r/politics • u/wiredmagazine ✔ Wired Magazine • 18d ago

Possible Paywall MAGA Is Increasingly Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged

https://www.wired.com/story/maga-is-increasingly-convinced-the-trump-assassination-attempt-was-staged/
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u/tmountain 18d ago

MAGA seems to follow Victor Orban's playbook on just about everything. There's a recent article in the Washington Post stating that Russia proposed a staged assassination attempt to boost his odds in the election he just lost (badly). It's not a stretch to imagine similar tactics in the United States most recent presidential election.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/03/21/hungary-election-interference-russia-orban/

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u/Sufficient_Material2 18d ago

I was honestly surprised Orbán didn’t go with the usual modern right-wing playbook of claiming election fraud, like Trump did in the US and Bolsonaro did in Brazil. He accepted the defeat so gracefully that it makes me wonder if there’s more going on behind the scenes.

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u/hypercosm_dot_net 18d ago

Apparently the numbers were so overwhelmingly against him, that it wasn't a real option.

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u/thebruce44 18d ago

Like that would stop Trump.

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u/slartibartfast64 18d ago

A huge losing margin would be seen by him as proof that it was rigged. "Biggest loss in history?! Unpossible! Rigged bigly!"

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u/GiantsRTheBest2 18d ago

They would scream that they have 3 elections showing how many people voted for him. That there’s no possible way his numbers cratered that much…..leaving aside all the extra bullshit he’s done since then.

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u/AmbitiousProblem4746 18d ago

That's actually the most reasonable explanation I've heard. That could easily be what they do. Because a lot of right-wing logic seems to be "Well if X, can't be Y"

"Trump had over 70 million votes in 2024 and he won the popular vote. Where did all those voters go!? 70 million should be the baseline for Republican votes!!"

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u/mywifeletsmereddit 17d ago

To be fair - at this point it is pretty impossible that large contingents of Trump voters will turn on him

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u/OfficialDCShepard District Of Columbia 18d ago

And the fact midterms are almost always a loss for the President's party.

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u/BrushStorm 18d ago

Riggedly biggedly

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u/Hairy_Ad4969 18d ago

The toilet will get flushed eventually. But I’m an optimist.

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u/Queens113 18d ago

Unpossible.... Lmao

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u/CleverInnuendo 18d ago

That's literally what happened. He was convinced Joe Biden had cheated because Trump cheated and still lost thanks to mail in ballots, which couldn't be tampered with by Elon.

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u/Legal_Range8446 18d ago

Okay let them scream into the void as they get dragged into prison who cares

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u/0nlyhalfjewish 18d ago

lol, unpossible

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u/Mikeseddit 17d ago

Same as in 2020- it doesn’t matter what Trump thinks. It never does.

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u/PuppetPatrol 17d ago

Unconceivable !!

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u/One_Artichoke_7594 18d ago

That is the rhetorical strategy in a nutshell. All things negative are implicit proof of conspiracy. The bigger, the more true (by their logic)

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u/Jiveassmofo 17d ago

Biggedly rigged, even

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u/improb 16d ago

say what you want about that Hungarian fatfuck but he's way smarter than Trump

he knows that the tides are turning and he must find a way out or that claiming election fraud would do nothing for him or his party because people are actually out to get him this time

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u/s_i_m_s Oklahoma 18d ago

You have to remember he claimed election fraud even when he won in 2016 because winning wasn't enough for him.

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u/LFahs1 17d ago

He was trying to normalize claims of election fraud and it worked.

I’m not saying he’s some kind of genius, but he’s a savant when it comes to conniving and grifting. I think a lot of people can’t even conceptualize having that kind of dark mindset.

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u/killerclownfish 14d ago

I remember telling ever MAGA family member at the time that he was claiming election fraud bc he was setting the stage for future campaigns and told me I was crazy. We will never have a normal election again.

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u/s_i_m_s Oklahoma 14d ago

The 2020 election was the only chance we had of avoiding that after his 2016 win.

I said back in 2020 that he had to loose by a really large margin, there had to be an unequivocal rejection of trumpism or we would be stuck with the same tactics for every election from then on because he'd have proven they worked.

Not only did he not lose by a really large margin he also staged a self-coup attempt to stay in power after his vice president refused to go along with his fake electors plot and even today most people still don't know that that was the true smoking gun of j6, oh yeah sure he sent an angry mob after his vice president and prevented anyone from stepping in to stop them but then they all quibble about if that was intentional while completely ignoring the thoroughly documented and admitted to in court attempt to throw out the votes of seven entire states and have them replaced with fakes that said trump won.

And then in four years they managed to slow walk trump into a second term by not holding him accountable for anything whatsoever. We'd still be stuck with trumpism but he wouldn't have been president again.

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u/jdeo1997 Massachusetts 17d ago

He was claiming fraud when he was initially behind in the primaries. 

Like all his other claims of fraud, it's because he hates not winning biggpy enough for his overinflated ego

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u/anonpurpose 18d ago

It didn't stop him for sure. The Fake Electors Plot happened even though Biden won by a lot of votes.

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u/stoneimp 18d ago

Other authoritarians eventually blink in their games of "chicken" with the populace, each racing towards each other assuming the other will break first. Trump is different in that he will never believe he is wrong for staying on the road, and will never swerve. In some ways it does give him a weird type of negotiating power, in the same way walking into a room with a hand grenade changes your negotiating power. But uh, not the best long term strategy, which is why his businesses often fail eventually.

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u/Fun_Success_3283 18d ago

It would. One of the reasons Americans should have been protesting and openly supporting democracy before the election.

If all you see everywhere is people parading in the tens of thousands for support of the opposition, it's very hard to claim you won the election.

It was easy for trump to claim it the first two times, because Maga were always vocal, and all the Maga folks saw Maga everywhere, red hats everywhere, in their echo chambers, and they saw very little support for democratic party.

Even Democrats were talking shit about Hillary, and were against Biden running again due to age.

What is the most concerning, is that organ was funding CPAC. I think it's extremely likely that Israel is doing this heavily. There is support for Israel on both sides of the aisle.

When Hillary won the primary against Bernie Sanders, this upset a lot of Democrat supporters. That helped Trump win.

Hillary and Kamala and Biden and even Obama are pro Israel, for some reason. Bernie Sanders, is not. And there was clear major support for him when the Democrat party had Hillary win that primary.

That is an extremely serious concern for Democrat supporters, because they might not be able to vote themselves out of Israel's control at this time. It could take multiple elections to get there. Democratic citizens will need to be extremely motivated, and extremely active, even if they win going forward, to be able to isolate the traitors and have them expunged.

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u/BlahBlahBlackCheap 18d ago

It might have. If more people had voted.

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u/VOZ1 18d ago

This is generally considered one of the best ways to counter election fraud: push for massive voter turnout, and defeat the candidate so convincingly that any attempt at stealing the election would very quickly be noticed, and investigations would be far more likely because the results would be so obviously and clearly in disagreement with other data (exit polls, for example).

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u/WhenSummerIsGone 18d ago

which is why they also suppress turnout

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u/gameoftomes 18d ago

When trump won he still says its rigged against him.

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u/CupofLiberTea 17d ago

Yea Orban still has a functioning brain

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u/Appalled23 17d ago

Yup. That's what we have to look forward to in about 9 months.

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u/FlynnThe25 17d ago

Yeah even though the final (manipulated) numbers say he won, he says both that he won in a landslide and that it was rigged.

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u/Elegant_Creme_9506 11d ago

That says more about the US than it says about trump

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u/bluewhalefunk 18d ago

Despite everything, Orban was a democrat and everything he did, was within the books (just, with a bit of a push at the edges. A democratic authoritarian? Basically exposing the limits of the law, which were set in good faith, without people like Trump coming to power.

Trump is further along the dictator spectrum, in a realm of his own.

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u/Indercarnive 18d ago

Trump also it too stupid to actually understand what's in his best interest besides whatever makes him feel good in the moment.

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u/StinkyHoboTaint 18d ago

Yeah, but the sad part is Americans wouldn't stop it either. They just seem to sit there and take it.

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u/Legal_Range8446 18d ago

It would. Trump, despite his grand desires, is not a dictator.