BlueAnon Watch: One-Third Of Democrats Believe Trump Faked Assassination Attempt As Conspiracy Theory Goes Mainstream

At the height of the "QAnon" fervor in 2021 - roughly 23% of Republicans said they believed the theory that Donald Trump is fighting a cabal of satanic, sex-trafficking pedophiles.

On Monday, a Morning Consult poll found that 34% of Democrats think Trump faked his own assassination attempt last Saturday. Such left-wing conspiracy theorists have been referred to as "BlueAnon," and as the Washington Free Beacon reports, this particular notion - that Trump faked the assassination attempt - originated with Democratic powerbroker Dmitri Mehlhorn, who has made at least 10 visits to the Biden White House.

Hours after the shooting on Saturday, Mehlhorn - and adviser to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (who joked about assassinating Trump the week before the attempt) - sent a memo to reports suggesting they portray the shooting as a false-flag operation directly from Vladimir Putin's playbook, designed to give Trump an iconic photo-op.

"This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power," wrote Melhorn, who failed to address numerous photos - such as the one showing a bullet whizzing past Trump's head, the obvious bullet wound across Trump's right ear, or the death of a rally attendee - Corey Comperatore, who was shot while shielding his family from bullets.

Oh?

As the Free Beacon reports, the conspiracy theory is spreading like wildfire:

Jeff Tiedrich, a liberal social media influencer with 1.1 million followers who attended an Oct. 2022 White House influencer summit to coordinate midterm election messaging with the Biden administration, on Monday posted a Substack screed "connecting some weird dots" surrounding the shooting.

"Did the extreme right want this to happen?" Tiedrich wrote, speculating the shooting could have been connected to a plot to replace Trump atop the GOP ticket with former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Tiedrich, who did not return a request for comment, on Thursday mocked the Washington Post for describing the shooting as "Trump's near-death experience" and said there was no hard evidence that a bullet grazed the former president's ear.

"What the fuck is going on under that bandage?" Tiedrich asked. "And why is the press so disinterested in finding out?"

Liberal MSNBC commentators have adopted a subtler approach to fanning the conspiratorial flames, suggesting in recent days that Trump could not have been shot in the ear by a high-caliber rifle bullet and that the former president is hiding something by not releasing detailed medical records about his wound.

"If he was shot by a high-caliber bullet, there should probably be very little ear there," MSNBC host Michael Steele told viewers on Tuesday.

Steele's fellow MSNBC host Joy Reid on Wednesday joined him in asking questions about Trump's injuries.

"I have many questions!" Reid wrote on Threads. "Like where are the medical reports? What caused Trump’s injury and what was the injury? Sheapnel? [sic] Glass? A bullet?"

Reid doubled down on her baseless conjecture Thursday morning, posting a video to TikTok in which she said that "we still don't know for sure whether Donald Trump was hit by a bullet," glass fragments, or something else. She then suggested something nefarious was behind the Secret Service's having "allowed" Trump to pump his fist as agents led him off the rally stage.

Meanwhile, former CNN reporter John Harwood, who admitted he's "not familiar with ballistics at all," suggested that Trump's ear shouldn't exist if an AR-15 bullet grazed it.

So... those spreading conspiracy theories should be deplatformed and debanked, correct? What playbook are we on.