Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.

About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.

The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.

Their views on the shooting in July and the apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.

I travelled to Colorado - which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen - for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.


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  • @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    83 months ago

    He could have told someone to do it, and then completely forgot about the entire thing. He doesn’t need to be told the details.

    But I think only him getting shot it the ear was fake. That’s a perfect spur of the moment thing to act like a victim.

    • nfh
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      143 months ago

      A really minor grazing could draw blood as seemed to happen at the first attempt, but heal within several days, which explains all the evidence I’ve seen.

      Dramatically exaggerating a minor wound to maximize the benefit to him seems exactly what Trump would do in that situation.