BUTLER, PENNSYLVANIA — Donald Trump survived an attempted assassination on July 13, 2024, when a bullet fired by a 20-year-old gunman on a nearby roof clipped the top of his ear during an open-air campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump supporter Corey Comperatore was shot and killed, and Secret Service agents killed the shooter.

In the months since the shooting, a range of commentators and activists have circulated competing theories about the incident. Joe Kent, former director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center, claimed that investigations into the Butler shooting were shut down before they finished and that a lack of public information about the incident would lead to more conspiracy theories.

"If you don't want to address that question, then you just go silent and say you can't ask that question. Which then creates people who come out of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions," Kent said in a podcast interview on Tucker Carlson's program.

Carlson wrote on X that the FBI lied about the shooter's online footprint. In a monologue posted on his channel, Carlson questioned the extent of Israel's control over the U.S. government and claimed that the Butler shooting, and what he described as the Trump administration's failure to investigate it, was a clue to that control.

Political commentator Candace Owens claimed in a recent podcast that Israeli-American political donor Miriam Adelson was behind the attempted assassination. Owens said the attack was carried out because Trump had failed to support Israel's annexation of the West Bank, and she suggested that Trump did not investigate the assassination properly after he became president.

Other claims have circulated on social media. Emerald Robinson posted on X that the FBI was responsible for staging the attempted assassination. Far-right activist Ali Alexander, who organized the Stop the Steal campaign after the 2020 presidential election, claimed on his Telegram channel that the attempted assassination was evidence that Trump is the Antichrist. Accounts described as Blue Anon suggested that the shooting was orchestrated by the Secret Service and that Trump used blood gel packs to draw sympathy and votes.