May 11, 2026 02:38 PM UTC

New Poll Results Demonstrate Fading Credibility of Trump Administration

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• by: Colorado Pols

As The Washington Post reports, new polling data shows that 1-in-4 Americans believe an April shooting outside the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington D.C. was a staged event — a remarkable number that indicates just how much credibility the Trump administration is losing.

Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans, according to a survey published Monday by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were also more likely than older people to think the incident was staged, according to the report…

…The NewsGuard survey found that 24 percent of U.S. adults believe the incident at the Washington Hilton was fake, compared with 45 percent who believed it was legitimate. An additional 32 percent said they were unsure. The survey of 1,000 American adults was conducted by YouGov from April 28 to May 4.

The Trump administration has pushed back on conspiracy theories with typical subtlety, but this is a problem of their own making:

The White House rejected the conspiracy theories in a statement provided after publication. “Anyone who thinks President Trump staged his own assassination attempts is a complete moron,” spokesman Davis Ingle said.

Joan Donovan, a Boston University professor who researches media manipulation, said the results are an indicator of the role of showmanship in Trump’s presidency. “It just seems incredibly Hollywood to imagine that this is staged,” Donovan said of the correspondents’ dinner shooting. “The entire apparatus of the government has been turned into a reality TV show.” [Pols emphasis]

It’s not just last month’s shooting that Americans are questioning, either:

To be clear, there is no evidence that any of these incidents were somehow staged, but this is a natural progression of a Presidential administration that is so transparently full of shit that conspiracies can run rampant. Trump’s Presidency was built through conspiracy theories; it’s no surprise that his administration is being buried by them.

As Boston University professor Joan Donovan told the Post: “A lot of it has to do with people being very unsure about the reliability of all of our institutions.”