Today, Explained - “Staged”

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Conspiracy theories flooded the internet after a shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. What used to be fringe is now a default reaction. This episode was produced by Kelli Wessinger and Danielle Hewitt, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. Security agents rush HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out of the ballroom during the shooting at the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche offered a bit of a reality check about the shooting at the White House Correspondence dinner. The president, he said, was not really in danger. This man was a floor above the ballroom with hundreds of federal agents between him and the president of the United States. The worst never came to pass. Law enforcement did not fail. They did exactly what they are trained to do. Solid attorney generaling. Then late yesterday, Blanche filed a request.

asking a federal judge to overturn a previous ruling and allow President Trump to build a ballroom. Wait, what? How did this get to be about the ballroom? Today on Today, explain from Vox, fallout from this weekend's attempted assassination. The good, the bad, the weird, the conspiracies, all of it up ahead. It's drone proof.

It's bulletproof class. We need the ballroom. If you need more evidence of why this still staged, everyone is talking about the ballroom. Burn your five pound weights. I'm not better son. I'm an athlete and fitness instructor, and I am telling you,

unless you have been limited to lighter weights by a medical professional, they're honestly inexcusable. You need to be lifting heavy, and I'm talking especially to the women out there. F*** toned arms. What can your body do? This week on Project Swagger,

what heavy means and rules to bring into your routine? Listen now. What are the biggest threats we face today? And the reason we, we call it everything everywhere all at once is because the idiosyncratic nature of the threats. I'm Preet Bharara. In this week, NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism, Rebecca Weiner, joins me to discuss the evolving nature of terrorism and targeted violence.

The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet, wherever you get your podcast. This is Today Explained. Molly Olmsted is a staff writer at Slate. She writes, about the right. Okay. So this weekend, White House Correspondents dinner is underway. Shooter enters the Hilton. Doesn't make it past security. No one is killed. Shooters apprehended. The internet reacts. And what's the reaction? It was instantaneously, I would say, skeptical in a way that was actually kind of remarkable. I mean, I know that I was fielding text messages from people asking me if it was staged within minutes of it happening.

You know, if you look, it was happening on the parts of the internet, the parts of social media that are dominated by liberal voices. A lot of people are not buying that this assassination attempt was legit. I mean, Trump is known to stage things for his benefit. I don't believe in that whole White House correspondent shooting event going on. Don't believe in it. I think it's all staged. They didn't even wait for evidence, really.

It just was kind of an almost gut reaction that people had based on the idea that there was an attack against the president and that there had been several of them before. It's not entirely unexpected, but it does make you wonder about the people who say it was staged. Okay, gotcha. Why? Why do they think it was staged? Well, there is what they'll tell you, which is that, you know, Trump's. facial expression doesn't look like it reflects real fear. Trump clearly smirks when shots are fired.

No panic, no fear. He knew it was coming. Or that there was something odd to how Caroline Levitt was saying there were going to be shots fired tonight, which she meant in a purely rhetorical way. There will be some shots fired tonight in the road. Then there were people who sort of couldn't believe. that a gunman would be able to get into the hotel. All right, I'll be that guy.

Where did the agents shoot him? What stopped him? Where's the blood? Why is his super trochlear vein not indicating that he is in any pain or distress? Is this another staged event? All of these things sort of reflect, I think, a lack of understanding maybe about how security operations work or about how just humans react to times of crises. and just sort of the randomness of life.

Why would President Trump stage this? What are people saying to that question? The dominant answer was that President Trump was using this to get support for his White House ballroom. There were two real reasons for this. One was that the president himself, you know, made the argument afterwards that this showed why they needed a secure ballroom. It's not a safe ballroom. I'm building a safe ballroom. And the second reason was that a bunch of MAGA influencers all said essentially the same thing.

After last night, I think it's safe to say that building the ballroom at the White House is an absolute must. Build the ballroom. Would be real nice if the White House had its own ballroom, huh? It's actually not remarkable. It's how the system, MAGA influencer system works. But to anyone who is less familiar with it, it seems really suspicious. So that's why Trump wanting the ballroom and staging his own assassination attempt to get the ballroom became the dominant narrative. One interesting thing and one thing that makes right-wing conspiracy different from left-wing conspiracy theories is that the accounts that are doing it are for the most part not actually that big.

They'll have lots of followers, but they won't be personalities that are really known into themselves. So with the right, you have these, you know, mega influencers, huge people who have huge podcasts who will be saying these things. With the left, it's sort of these like lib accounts. And they will post either to try and provoke some sort of anti-Trump outrage or as a sort of engagement bait, something to encourage discussion. So before saying, like, I believe this was staged, they would pull their followers to be like, do you think this was staged? Which was so clearly an attempt to get their own engagement for their own financial gain. And I also have to say here that I don't know, I don't really have a way of knowing of how many of these are bots, because again, they are not really known people. But there are a lot of just strivers in this space.

that are clearly pushing this. What do you mean by strivers? It's a great word. I think I mean people who aspire to the kind of influence that the right-wing influencers have, the people who want to take up their own space within the movement. And they are really trying to get power, influence, and are really just not able to carve out their own space

with quite the success that a lot of these, like, big-name conservatives are able to. to do. You noted that it was like minutes after the shooting happened, that the online conversation becomes conspiratorial. Were you surprised it happened that fast? I mean, this may be a little naive of me, but I was a little surprised. I did expect it to happen because, I mean, we live in this world where this is how people are thinking. I mean, especially after the shooting in Butler, there was something very dramatic about that assassination attempt. The gunshots erupting during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The microphone picking up the cries of people yelling to get down. It was a crazy moment. You know, I went on to win the presidency. I don't know if that had anything to do with it, to be honest. There was just such drama to it that, It lent itself to people sort of going to the most fantastical place. Just admit you staged it in Butler. So right after there are gunshots fired at a campaign event,

Trump's team's first reaction is to go get the photographers. Basically, it all looks really suspicious and really bizarre. So they're primed to see another assassination attempt as a hoax. This is just the waters we're in now. Everyone's a conspiracy theorist. The U.S. fell victim to conspiracy-mindedness. I don't know. Sometime in the last 10 years is what I would say is where I would place it.

It doesn't feel like this is anything new. It feels like this is a continuation. But that's me. I don't cover this and you do. Is something new happening this week in the last 72 hours? I do feel like there is something that's new here. these conspiracy theories used to be largely the purview of the right. I think in the second Trump administration, really, we have seen an explosion of this kind of thinking into the left, but also in a way that has escaped the normal boundaries of partisan thinking.

So you've seen offshootes within the MAGA movement of people who are thinking in this conspiracy theory way, in a way that does not actually benefit President Trump in a way that actually puts them at odds with other parts of the conservative movement. The annals of history, I think within them, you will be relegated to a philosophical discussion, the madness of President Trump. A lot of people who really like Trump

are very disappointed in Trump. In fact, more than disappointed, feel betrayed. And you see this with people on the left who previously felt that they were in opposition to the conspiracy thinking that drove, say, QAnon, but now they are actively engaging in this themselves. If I were defending the conspiracy theorizing from the left, here's what I might say. Tell me what you think. President Trump and members of his administration lie constantly. Why should we believe their recounting of events? Why shouldn't we be convinced that if they're

going to lie to us about, I don't know, immigration and tariffs, they wouldn't also lie about an assassination attempt. I totally do think that if we're talking about something like war crimes or, you know, financial shenanigans or anything, really, that should be met with suspicion. And I think this is also a reporter's obligation to do so as well. I do think, though, that when it comes to these sort of complex conspiracy theories, there has to be something to base it on. And when it comes to Butler, Pennsylvania's assassination attempt, when it comes to this incident, there's really nothing. I mean, there were so many journalists who were in that room, not where the incident occurred because that was outside of the White House correspondence dinner. But they were around.

If there was some sort of indication that there was some sort of malfeasance, I mean, I think we should absolutely pursue it. But this is based off of nothing but speculation. I think that jumping to that is ultimately harmful for our democracy. We would not be working off of a shared reality in any way that lets us get to any sort of practical solutions. for any of the myriad problems our country faces. We can't work in a system in which we all just treat each other as the most fantastical extreme version of ourselves.

So trust Donald Trump? Absolutely not. But jump to think that there's some sort of convoluted, strange thing going on? That's not healthy either. Molly Olmsted is a staff writer at Slate. When we return Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, acts. Support for the showty comes from Quince.

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1,800 flowers, a website. This is today explained. Paula Reid is the chief legal affairs correspondent for CNN. She was at the White House correspondent's dinner and was also watching the aftermath, in part to see how the acting head of the DOJ would conduct himself. It was interesting when the president addressed the nation late Saturday. he was flanked by his top two Justice Department officials,

Todd Blanche and Kasper Tal. Todd is the acting attorney general, and he came out and did what you would expect the nation's top law enforcement official to do. Tell us what they know about what's going on. There will be multiple charges around the shooting, around the possession of firearms and anything else that we can get on this guy.

Detail exactly what steps they were taking and what we can expect next. Justice will be served. Todd Blanche has actually, I think, really met the moment perfectly, especially in the larger context of my reporting on his audition for Attorney General. Because what happened Saturday night, this is the first thing that has sort of happened to the Blanche Justice Department, as opposed to being something they've done, or what we've seen throughout the Trump Justice Department,

which has been a lot of self-inflicted controversies, the handling of the Epstein files. Please raise your hands if you have still not been able to meet with this Department of Justice. Please know for the record that every single survivor has raised their hand. The controversial firings. Well, the Justice Department issued a wave of firings late last week and into the weekend. In fact, more than 20 of those employees were people who worked on former special counsel Jack Smith's cases against President Donald Trump. They are gone. They've been let go.

Decisions they've made around cases trying to charge people, that's all self-inflicted. But when you're the Attorney General, you're going to deal with a Boston Marathon bombing or a San Bernardino shooting. This is not quite of that level, but it is. is certainly a massive event that they have to respond to. So seeing how you respond to something that was not of your own doing, I mean, that is a real test for the Attorney General. And so far, it's been a textbook response from him. He certainly can't afford to mess this up, given the significance,

but we heard from him immediately after the event with the president. He did the Sunday shows. He took questions. Was it safe to have the president, cabinet officials, members of Congress, the first lady, the vice president, such high-ranking officials all in the same room at the same time. Yes, of course. We're not going to stop living. We're not going to start doing our jobs. We're not going to stop all the work that we're doing every day. And then we heard from him again after Monday's arraignment. So Todd Blanche is new to this job. Pam Bondi, of course, was fired earlier this month. The Dow is over 50,000 right now.

Tell me about how Todd Blanche ended up in this job. Where does he come from? So I'm going to push back on the idea that he's new to the job because he is officially, yes, the acting attorney general now. Prior, he was the deputy attorney general. Usually the difference there is the deputy attorney general runs this sprawling agency in all the different U.S. Attorney's offices and components, the FBI and the marshals, it's the boss running the day-to-day behind the scenes. The Attorney General is usually more the front-facing figurehead. But with Pam Bond, and her repeated stumbles, public stumbles over the Epstein files and other matters, Todd took on a more public-facing role. He was also sort of a bigger presence behind the scenes. It was constantly in contact with the White House, with Stephen Miller, with the president. Pam Bondi talked to the president as well. But Todd really in many ways was doing a lot of

this job. So he started out, he was actually federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York for a long time. Then he went into white collar practice. And then he joined the Trump legal team, around 2023 when Trump was in the middle of those four major legal cases, and Todd worked on the two federal cases brought by Jack Smith. The attack on our nation's capital on January 6, 2021 was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. In a post on truth social, Trump said he had been indicted, quote, over what he called the boxes hoax.

That is a reference to the boxes found at his Mar-a-Lago estate by the FBI last August, which contained classified materials. He also represented him in New York on the Hushmoney case. But what will really distinguish Todd Blanche is that Trump lawyers come and go. I mean, I've probably talked to like 40 of them over the past decade, right? They come, they go, they have trouble with the client,

they have trouble with some of the people behind the scenes, the spotlight, the cases. Todd flourished. Yes, his client was convicted in New York, but he kept him out of jail. And ultimately, their legal strategy on the federal cases resulted in Trump never facing trial on either one of those in Trump's eyes. Todd Blanche is the guy who kept him out of jail.

What has he been up to since he ended up in the acting role? He's been a busy beat. In my reporting, I talked to over a dozen people inside DOJ, high-level people. Some people I know don't particularly care for Todd as a person, their rivals, whatever. There was a general consensus, though. This is his job to lose. But in order to keep this, he's going to have to deliver on weaponization for the president. And that means Trump wants his political adversaries to be prosecuted.

And that is something that they have not been able to do yet. Judges and grand juries have to sign off on this. They are largely been reluctant. A U.S. District Judge ruled the appointment of attorney Lindsey Halligan is unlawful. We have learned that the Justice Department's case against former FBI director Jim Comey and the New York Attorney General have both been dismissed. And so they're getting tripped up. by the checks in the system. It's nearly impossible. In some cases, the things that Trump has wanted,

but he's made it clear this is what he wants. So that's ultimately, in order to get this job and to keep it, he needs to bring a case against a political adversary. All right, so we know that President Trump likes Todd Blanche. We know that MAGA has been disappointed by the job that the Justice Department has done investigating the Epstein files. How many of you are satisfied? You can, you can clap. satisfied with the results of the Epstein investigation. Clap. I think it's a huge miscalculation. And I truly just stand with the women.

And I think they deserve to be the ones that we're fighting for. When will we see justice? Does MAGA, which was very unfriendly at the end toward Pam Bondi, does MAGA like Todd Blanche? So the two knocks on Todd Blanche are that quote, he's not bad at enough. And that he doesn't get the Trump DOJ away from the quote, original sin of how they've handled the Epstein files. Let's start with, are you MAGA enough? So I have talked to officials inside the administration, including this one White House official who said, yeah, we feel that Todd is not MAGA enough. He doesn't do enough for the base.

But even those people, who in past stories have been pretty tough on Todd, said when it comes to being the acting attorney general, he's done the job, it's about as good as we're going to get, we're not opposed to him having this job. So when it comes to the Epstein file, One administration official told me that is, quote, the original sin of the Trump Justice Department. And by that, they mean just Pam Bondi's repeated bungling of the rollout of those files, promising there was new information and those binders that she handed out that really had just a rehash. I think so it was already in the public domain. Her saying that she had a client list on her desk when really there's no client list. Eventually they just had Todd take over the messaging, right?

To the extent that there's frustration, I understand. where that comes from, just from what we know about Mr. Epstein. I hope that the work that the men and women within this department have done over the past two months hopefully is able to bring closure. He was also the one who went down and met with Galane Maxwell. He was the one who oversaw the release of the documents. He has been front and center on this. So when he becomes the acting attorney general, the concern from some administration officials is,

while putting him in charge, isn't going to get us past our big, as embarrassment, which is Epstein. But I don't think in Trump's eyes, that's going to be disqualifying, because I think many people say that Todd had to go and pick up the mess that Pam Bondi had made. And he or some of the staffers might argue that Congress put him in a bad position because they had so little time to do those redactions. No intelligent minds could argue that Justice Department has actually had like a decade to release all this stuff, but that's a matter for another day. He's just talking about the type timeline that he had to do that review process, and that is part of why they say it was so messy, as opposed to a grand conspiracy

to protect people. He is acting AG. Is this job his, if he wants it? Are there any other serious contenders? My sources say this job is Todd's to lose. Now, even if you get it, every Trump Attorney General has been fired, replaced, or resigned. So we'll see. Maybe he's found his Merritt Garland, who wants to stay through the end.

But there are certainly other people nipping at Todd's heels. But in the eyes of the president and everyone I've talked to, this is his job to lose. But there are also some people in the wings. One is the U.S. attorney, Gene Piero. I see too much violent crime being committed by young punks who think that they can get together in gangs and crews and beat the hell out of you or anyone else.

It was funny the night of the dinner and the shooting. Todd was at the White House. She did the press conference to the president, said there will be charges, there'll be a gun charge, maybe a law enforcement-related charge. 30, 45 minutes later, I don't remember how much time passed, but the U.S. Attorney Piro, she did a press conference, and, man, she was yelling the specific statutes into that microphone. Right now, the defendant is being charged with two counts, 924C, using a firearm during a crime of violence, and a second crime under 111, which is assault on a federal.

federal officer using a dangerous weapon. It felt a little like one-upsmanship. Maybe it was just her enthusiasm, and I'm reading something into it. But her name has certainly been mentioned. We got two and a half more years. I mean, there's probably time for everyone to be Attorney General if Todd can't or won't stay in the job for two and a half years. It's a tough job under any administration.

But this one really brings some unique challenges. Paula Reid is CNN's chief legal correspondent. Danielle Hewitt and Kelly Wessinger produced today's show in Jolie Myers edited. David Tadishore is our engineer and Gabriel Duntov check the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.