After Trump Assassination Attempt, Some Veterans Spread Misinformation. Others Pushed Back. We surveyed the social media accounts of the 95 veterans in Congress. Here’s what we found.
When the first shot rang out at the Trump rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, Jondavid Longo recognized the sound. But his brain wouldn’t allow him to believe it.
“I thought, ‘OK, this might be a firecracker, a balloon, or something,’” the Marine Corps veteran and mayor of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, told The War Horse. “On the second shot, I realized exactly what it was.”
Longo, who deployed to Afghanistan as an infantry rifleman, dived on top of his pregnant wife and yelled for people to get down in the chilling moments after the gunfire.
“My hope in joining the Marine Corps and going to Afghanistan,” he said, “was that I would endure those sounds and those sights and those smells and those thoughts and feelings so that my family never would have to.”
When he got home that night, like so many stunned Americans eager for updates, Longo turned to social media and shared his gratitude: “I’m home now. I’m alright. My family is safe.”
By then, the frenzy of misinformation, early conspiracy theories, and violent rhetoric was already exploding across the Internet. A would-be assassin’s failed attempt to gun down former President Donald Trump—and growing concerns over the Secret Service’s failure to secure the rally—have catapulted the country, already in a fraught moment, to unprecedented levels of political tension.
And veterans—whose military service still commands high levels of trust across the political spectrum—are using their influence to both fuel and cool the debate.
Longo said the choice should be easy.
“There should be no veteran who would ever fan the flames of rhetoric that would increase the potential for violence here at home,” he said.
But in the hours and days after the shooting, some veterans online helped spread false narratives about the attempted assassination, leveraging their ostensible expertise to give their social media posts credibility. Some insisted the shooting was an “inside” job, meant to take down Trump, and that countersnipers could have easily taken out the shooter if they wanted to. Others said the shooting was staged to garner Trump sympathy.
On Truth Social, the social media site owned by Trump, a Marine Corps veteran smelled “a big infestation of Deep State Rats.” On X, formerly known as Twitter, an Army veteran said the sound of the bullets made it clear the shooting was fake.
Even some politicians raised unfounded suspicions shortly after the shooting.
“It would take extreme negligence to overlook the risk of a sniper on that roof if you were tasked with securing the site. Epic failure or far worse?” posted Warren Davidson, an Army veteran and a Republican representative from Ohio.
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A War Horse analysis of social media posts from the official and personal accounts of the 95 veterans who are members of Congress found four suggested that the assassination attempt may have been allowed to happen or was somehow orchestrated from inside the government. Seven posted that they did not trust the FBI, DHS, or the Secret Service to do a thorough investigation, and eleven directly blamed President Biden or the Democrats for the shooting.
With shaken rallygoers still heading home about two hours after the shooting, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance—a Marine Corps veteran—unleashed his opinion on X, reaching more than 18 million views. (His next post on a fundraiser for the victims, by comparison, got 2.2 million views.)
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” he wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.
“That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
More than a week into the investigation, there is no evidence the 20-year-old shooter had any partisan motive.
Less than 48 hours after Vance’s post, Trump named the senator as his vice-presidential running mate.
A 1,200% Spike in References to Civil War
The July 13 shooting injured former President Trump and two rallygoers, and killed Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old firefighter and Army Reserve veteran.
The next day, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism summed up the extreme reaction to the tragedy on social media. On Telegram, a platform favored by the far right, references to “civil war” grew by more than 1,200% that Saturday, compared to the previous day. Experts who spoke with The War Horse said that most calls for violence came from the far right, but that they are also seeing increasing violent rhetoric from the far left.
There are reports that some militias have started recruiting off of the Trump rally shooting, though extremism experts cautioned that it’s too early to predict how much online activity will turn into action in the real world.
But violent rhetoric has other consequences in a democracy, experts say: It normalizes bloodshed.
“We’ll talk about violence, it becomes more acceptable so that when it does happen in the real world, we’re less inclined to think, ‘Oh, this is bad,’ as a society,” says Amy Cooter, the research director at Middlebury’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism.
The tension following the shooting was compounded by the fact that, for days, there was very little information about the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, or his motives—opening a black hole that quickly filled with unfounded theories and misinformation. NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation online, found that mentions of “staged” and “inside job” on X grew by more than 3,000% each in the two days following the shooting.
“I think people are very much looking for answers right now,” says Freddy Cruz, the program manager for monitoring and training at the Western States Center, a think tank that focuses on extremism and democracy. “And unfortunately, it looks like there’s a lot of people trying to offer answers.”
‘This is how misinformation flies’
After the shooting, several posts from people who claimed to have served in the military went viral. In one, a poster said his military sniper experience led him to believe that the shooting was planned and executed by people inside the government, “without a doubt in my mind.”
Rep. Cory Mills, a Republican from Florida and an Army veteran, said on CNN that his own countersniper experience led him to ask whether the lapse in security “was intentional as opposed to fecklessness” and said that the possibility should be considered in an investigation. He continued the speculation on Fox News and social media.
No evidence has emerged that the shooting was an inside attack. The gunman was a registered Republican who had searched online for politicians from both parties, as well as for the locations of the Democratic National Convention and Trump rallies.
Lawmakers in both parties have expressed anger and frustration over the stunning security failures at the rally in Pennsylvania. In a congressional hearing on Monday, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testified that the roof where the gunman was perched had been identified as a potential security vulnerability and that the Secret Service had received multiple reports of a suspicious person before the shooter opened fire.
Cheatle—who resigned Tuesday under intense pressure to step down—repeatedly referred to ongoing investigations in declining to provide more details about the breakdown. Some lawmakers with military experience said the lack of information was fueling the wild speculation.
“Are you aware that there are rumors rampant online that there were multiple shooters?” said Rep. Mike Waltz, a Republican from Florida and a former Army Green Beret. He also pointed out that “people are speculating there could have been foreign involvement” because the shooter had what he described as “overseas encrypted platforms.”
“This is how misinformation flies,” he said.
After the hearing, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida and an Air Force veteran, posted on X that she left the hearing “convinced” that the gunman “was not working alone.”
Veteran voices can come across as authoritative on matters that involve the military or the government—which is the case with many conspiracy theories, says Elizabeth Yates, a democracy protection researcher at the nonprofit Human Rights First. She has studied how military influencers have advanced narratives about QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory that claims Trump has been selected to destroy a cabal of blood-drinking pedophiles who control global affairs.
In one post on X after the Trump rally shooting, a user claiming to have worked in military intelligence offered an analysis that authorities “allowed” the gunman to shoot at Trump. On Truth Social, a retired Air Force special operator claimed insider knowledge that special forces in the military had previously protected Trump from dozens of “deep state assassination attempts.”
With veterans, Yates said, “you’re looking at people who in society we view as apolitical and have a lot of legitimacy. … There’s no question that because they have this experience that they are called on to lend credence to the specific military elements of these conspiracy theories.”
‘Before you start pointing fingers’
One Trump supporter in Congress stood out in our review of social media messages for pushing back against conspiracies.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Texas who served as a Navy SEAL in Iraq and Afghanistan, released a video calling out posts from former snipers for spreading misinformation.
“A lot of people are trying to mislead you, trying to enrage you, trying to make you think that, again, it’s some preplanned operation,” Crenshaw said in the video. He said there were security failures. “But you have to know at least the facts and the context before you start pointing fingers.”
He argued that there are major differences between countersniper operations in Iraq or Afghanistan and security at a presidential rally attended by thousands of American citizens, a point that Longo, the Slippery Rock mayor, echoed.
“We need to remember too that the way that we address threats here in the United States at home is incredibly different from the way that you address threats in a combat zone,” Longo said.
Yates points out that veterans’ experiences can make them particularly powerful voices in pushing back against misinformation and calls for violence.
“They have this really unique opportunity to be a strong advocate for democracy,” she says.
Chris Purdy agrees. The Iraq war veteran launched a new initiative, The Chamberlain Network, to organize veterans in defense of democracy just days before the assassination attempt.
“Do you want Atlanta to look like Fallujah? No,” he says. “Veterans understand. We know what political violence does to nations.”
In a joint statement responding to the assassination attempt, the co-chairs of the bipartisan For Country Caucus, a group of 30 veterans in Congress, called for calm.
“Political violence is unacceptable and has no place in our society,” wrote Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Navy veteran and Republican from Texas and Rep. Jason Crow, Democrat, of Colorado, and a former Army Ranger. “To restore civility, our elected leaders must dial down dangerous rhetoric and seek to unite our nation. In unity lies our greatest strength.”
Two-thirds of the 95 veterans in Congress used their social media accounts to condemn political violence or call for softening the rhetoric, according to The War Horse survey.
Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, an Air Force veteran, was one of them. In 2017, he was standing near home plate when a gunman opened fire at a baseball field where GOP congress members were practicing for a charity game.
“We’re in this era where if you don’t believe 100% the way I want you to believe or the way I believe that you’re my enemy,” he told WSB-TV in Atlanta, linking to the clip on X. “The only way that we can bring this level down, it’s up to us.”
A coalition of 17 veterans groups, including Student Veterans of America, the National Military Family Association, and Mission Roll Call, also released a statement condemning the violence and calling for a commitment to democratic norms.
“Regardless of individual politics, an attack on any candidate for office, elected official or election official is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the system of self-government that our men and women in uniform have served and sacrificed to protect,” they wrote.
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Ellen Gustafson, the executive director of We the Veterans and Military Families, told The War Horse in an interview earlier this year that while people often think of the military community as a single demographic, the reality is different: A shared ethos of service ties together an exceptionally diverse group of people.
“We’re not a monolith. We’re a pluralistic community,” she said. “That’s actually a pretty good example of Americans working together and putting politics aside, and we should be a little bit louder about that.”
The week of the Trump rally shooting, her group, which has spearheaded an effort to recruit veterans and military family members to work as poll workers, announced it had blown past its goal of signing up 100,000 new volunteers for the upcoming election.
Purdy said that the most important thing people who have served can do is to be the loudest voices in their local communities—to hammer home, again and again, that the idea so many Americans fought to protect and defend is still worth protecting and defending today.
“What veterans can do is they can show up to their town hall, their state houses, their VFW, whatever it is, their barbecues for the holidays, and get people to believe in democracy,” he says.
“It sounds corny, it really does. But democracy is like fairy dust, right? It only works if you believe in it.”
This War Horse story was reported by Sonner Kehrt, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Abbie Bennett wrote the headlines. Samantha Daniels, Becca Keaty and Anne Marshall-Chalmers provided research assistance.
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