Enjoying the show? Support our mission and help keep the content coming by buying us a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/deepdivepodcastOn July 13, 2024, an event that lasted just 16 terrifying seconds—a single sniper shot near Butler, Pennsylvania—threatened to upend a presidential election. But the attack itself was only the beginning. The story of what unfolded in the moments, hours, and days after the shot, online and across the country, is a stunning portrait of a nation instantly fractured into separate realities. This episode sets the scene, breaks down the minute-by-minute timeline, and then dives into the unprecedented information war that erupted, creating two completely different versions of a shared national crisis.
The event, occurring just two days before the Republican National Convention, was immediately branded the biggest security failure since the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981, highlighting a total collapse of the protective bubble around our leaders. We zoom in on the critical, horrifying moments of the official timeline: officers photographing the shooter acting suspiciously nearly an hour before the attack, the critical radio call that "someone's on the roof," and the terrifying 16-second window of violence itself. The defining image, captured by photojournalist Evan Vucci—a bloody Donald Trump raising his fist to the crowd—went viral instantly, framing the narrative for millions before the full story was even known.
The shooting, a calculated sniper shot from a rooftop 400 feet away, immediately raised serious questions about security and carried a tragic human cost. We discuss the investigation's finding: the death of rally attendee Cory Comparator, who was killed while shielding his family, and the identification of the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Crooks. A single conflicting detail about Crooks—a registered Republican who made a small donation to a Democratic fundraising group—became instant fuel for the information war that was about to explode.
The unavoidable question of how this happened led all eyes to the Secret Service. The investigation laid out a clear chain of failures: officers spotting Crooks with a range finder but letting him slip away; Crooks accessing an unsecured rooftop by climbing an AC unit; and critical police snipers being positioned in a blind spot. The fallout was swift and bipartisan, leading to the resignation of Secret Service director Kimberly Cheadle just ten days after the shooting.
However, while the official investigation was underway, a full-blown information war unfolded in parallel online. Within minutes of the gunshot, misinformation and conspiracy theories spread like wildfire, creating totally contradictory stories for each side of the political spectrum. One dominant theory claimed the attack was a "Deep State" plot run by Democrats to stop Trump; the other argued it was a "false flag operation" staged by Republicans to make Trump look like a hero, complete with claims of "fake blood" and "crisis actors." A survey by Northeastern University found that a majority of people had heard the Republican staging theory, and 41% had heard the Democratic plot theory. This means millions of Americans were instantly living in completely different realities.
Ultimately, this event became a stark reminder of our fractured information world, where a shared national trauma was instantly shattered into mutually exclusive realities. As Professor Laura Putnam noted, when faced with something scary, our natural instinct is to fall back on what we already believe, looking for stories that confirm our worldview rather than challenging it. The shooting was a real event with real victims, but it created multiple conflicting realities in an instant. This leaves us with a difficult final question: If we can't even agree on the basic facts of a shared national trauma, how can we ever find the common ground needed to make sense of it together?
