TOM LEONARD: So what IS the truth about Trump’s shooting?

It was all over in two and a half minutes of gunfire and screaming.

And yet, even as Donald Trump was bundled into an armoured Chevrolet Suburban SUV and driven off to safety, it was obvious that the drama was only just beginning.

There are simply too many terrible mistakes, too many lingering questions and too many people keen to spread rumours on social media for the scandal to go away.

The recent revelation that Thomas Crooks, the man whose rifle bullet grazed the ex-president’s ear at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, three weeks ago, had earlier researched how Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F Kennedy in 1963 is strangely appropriate.

After all, history may end up remembering Crooks in the same way: as a man at the centre of a debate over whether he acted alone or was part of a dark conspiracy.

A Gallup poll last year revealed that a shocking 65 per cent of adult Americans believe Oswald didn’t act alone, as the government has always claimed.

Yet another Hollywood conspiracy film, made by the celebrated screenwriter and playwright David Mamet and this time blaming the Mafia, is in the works.

And as Trump lovers and haters spar over what happened in Pennsylvania, they do at least agree on one thing: the official narrative just won’t suffice.

Even Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin doctor, was at it this week.

The man who loves to decry the spread of misinformation online posted a photo of Trump from a recent press conference, alerting his 1.1million followers on X to an apparently unblemished right ear with the words, ‘That ear… miracle…’

A number of commenters accused Campbell of irresponsibly encouraging a Left-wing conspiracy theory that the Trump camp arranged a fake assassination attempt to boost his pre-election popularity.

Some Right-wingers, meanwhile, have an equally inflammatory counter-thesis: that the attempt on Trump’s life was the work of shadowy forces on the Left.

From claims that the Secret Service deliberately ignored a clear and present danger to the ex-president to suggestions there was a second shooter lurking in a water tower, this is a gift that keeps on giving to those who refuse to accept Trump’s protectors simply messed up.

REPUBLICANS ‘STAGED THE SHOOTING’

Alastair Campbell is not the only one to question why Trump’s ear appears completely unscathed less than a month after being hit by a high-velocity rifle round that sent blood streaming down his face.

A poll of Democrat supporters conducted by business intelligence company Morning Consult found that one third believes the shooting was staged by Trump supporters with no intention of harming him.

Under widely-shared hashtags such as #staged, #fakeassassination and #stagedbytrump, social media posts that pore over the issue have been viewed – in some cases – more than a million times.

Why, most important of all, was a 20-year-old nursing home assistant able to get so close to Trump with an assault-style rifle, lie down on an unguarded roof, take aim – and then so narrowly miss him after he turned his head at the last moment?

Trump’s opponents suspect this is all too neat to be true as it has given his campaign an obvious boost, allowing supporters to hail him as a hero who came within an inch of martydom.

Senior Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have even claimed that God personally intervened to protect the former president.

What happened immediately after the shots rang out has also struck some as suspicious.

The Donald is famously adept at exploiting any opportunity to make political capital but even seasoned Trump watchers were shocked at how quickly he recovered from being shot in the ear and thrown to the ground by his bodyguards.

Just seconds later he was on his feet, shaking his clenched fist in defiance and shouting: ‘Fight, fight, fight’.

Equally suspicious for some is why on earth his bodyguards allowed him to expose himself to any potential accomplices of Crooks – unless, of course, they knew for a fact that there wasn’t another shooter nearby.

It also seemed fortuitous that an Associated Press photographer was on hand to snap what will surely be the defining image of Trump’s re-election campaign: a bloodied but unbowed contender, fist raised and surrounded by bodyguards, raising his right fist as a large American flag flutters in a clear blue sky behind him.

‘It was too damn perfect,’ said one sceptical US-based YouTuber, noting ‘the flag positioned perfect and everything’.

The post was later deleted with an apology but not before almost one million people had viewed it.

‘It looks very staged,’ wrote ‘Jane Eire’ on X on the day of the shooting – again earning more than one million views. ‘Sounded like a BB gun. Nobody in the crowd is running or panicking.’ Yet, undeniably, one man – father Corey Comperatore – lay dead with a bullet in the head.

‘DEMOCRATS PLANNED THE ASSASSINATION’

The first claim that the Left – in the shape of Antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists’ – was responsible for the assassination attempt was posted on social media site X just four minutes after the shooting.

Some conservatives recalled how, only days earlier, President Biden had complained that he was tired of talking about his poor performance in June’s televised debate and told his supporters that: ‘It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.’

It proved an unfortunate choice of words.

Within a few hours of the incident, Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert stated: ‘Joe Biden is responsible for the shooting today.’

Since then, however, some Republicans have gone a step further, suggesting that Democrats somehow organised it themselves, describing the culprits as simply ‘they’.

This is the accepted shorthand in Trump World for the ‘deep state’, his enemies within the establishment who are determined to crush him.

Even US congressmen are not above pushing this incendiary line, despite the absence of any supporting evidence.

They have been joined by Trump’s sons Eric and Don Junior, the former stating in one TV interview: ‘I said that the Democrats would stop at absolutely nothing.’

Eli Crane, a US Representative for Arizona and former Navy SEAL, has also repeatedly pushed this line – while insisting he is no conspiracy theorist.

Crane, who even travelled to the site of the shooting in Pennsylvania to conduct his own investigation, last week told a radio show: ‘Not only did they try and bankrupt him, but they tried to put him in prison. When that didn’t work, they tried to put him in prison for 750 years. And many of us said the next step in this escalation is for them to try and kill him because they can’t — they know they can’t beat him fair and square.’

And Representative Cory Mills of Florida, a former Army sniper, has echoed the argument of many on the Right who say that the sheer scale of the security failings point to conspiracy rather than cock up.

He told CNN: ‘I have a very difficult time not leaning myself toward this was intentional as opposed to fecklessness.’

Such speculation is unlikely to go away. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, one of the Republican congressmen who has suggested online that the Left was indeed trying to stop Trump that day, has been appointed to the bipartisan Washington task force now investigating the assassination attempt.

Beyond the relatively sober atmosphere of the US Congress, the accusations have, predictably, been somewhat more explicit.

Far-Right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones told his 2.6million X followers that the shooting was a ‘deep state’ murder plot, an ‘inside job’ and even a ‘failed coup’.

THE SECRET SERVICE ‘TURNED A BLIND EYE’

As the Secret Service has been portrayed in myriad Hollywood feature films as the infallible protector of American presidents, when it does foul up in real life, nobody can quite believe it was an accident.

And Trump’s fans – fed on a diet of deep state conspiracy theories – have little difficulty believing that the men and women in the dark suits and sunglasses (employed by a federal agency, after all) are ‘in’ on the plot.

Thomas Crooks was not only able to get on to an unsecured warehouse roof just 400 feet or so from the rally stage but set up his assault rifle and fire eight rounds unimpeded, at least three of which came close to seriously wounding or killing Trump.

‘That person was allowed to scale that roof,’ declared the outspoken conservative commentator Candace Owens on TikTok.

Owens says she spent considerable time around Trump when he was president and that nobody could get near him without the Secret Service ‘being aware of it’.

She claimed that agents once almost shot her husband for getting too close to Trump. So, for her, it was impossible to accept it was an accident that a man with a rifle was allowed to get within shooting range.

The Secret Service has even been forced to reject the claims that it denied requests to enlarge Trump’s ‘protective detail’. Or that it had assigned shorter and allegedly less-experienced female agents in a deliberate bid to endanger him.

Instead, giving evidence to the Senate, Secret Service bosses tried to blame the local police, who were responsible for securing the perimeter of the rally and the building used by the gunman.

The police officers in Pennsylvania angrily reject this criticism, blaming the Secret Service for a fatal breakdown in communication.

One police sniper said he had texted warnings to the Secret Service about Crooks a full 90 minutes before the shooting started after the gunman had been seen wandering outside the rally with a golf ‘range finder’, a form of hi-tech eye glass used to calculate distance.

But the Secret Service – whose own snipers hadn’t even turned up to a planned briefing with their police counterparts, and who might not have received the alerts – did nothing in response, he claims.

The Secret Service certainly seems to have been slow off the mark. The Washington Post reported this week that it was a member of a police SWAT team at ground level – and not a member of the Secret Service – who was actually the first to return fire after he saw muzzle flashes from Crooks’ collapsible AR15-style rifle.

The police shot caused the gunman to retreat from his roof-top perch and stop firing for crucial seconds – which then allowed a Secret Service counter-sniper to spot and kill him.

Online speculation was given a new lease of life on Thursday when a newly uncovered video clip filmed by one of the Trump supporters injured in the shooting showed a figure moving across the roof top used by the gunman three minutes before the firing started.

Posted online by popular conservative commentator Benny Johnson among others, the clip has been watched at least 3.8million times.

Johnson said it contradicted the Secret Service’s claim that snipers couldn’t see Crooks beyond the roof line.

TRUMP ‘WASN’T ACTUALLY SHOT’ AT ALL

In a congressional hearing following the attack, the FBI’s Director, Christopher Wray, said that there was ‘some question’ about whether Trump was struck by ‘a bullet or shrapnel’.

Even if he was only hit by shrapnel, the gunman must surely have been aiming at the former president as there were few other obvious targets among Trump’s supporters and bodyguards.

However, Wray’s remark gave fresh impetus to a theory that started circulating as soon as armchair detectives were able to pore over slowed-down footage of the moment the bullets were fired.

This is the claim that Trump appeared to be holding a yellow object in the hand that he immediately clutched to his injured ear.

Did he burst a bag of theatrical blood on the ear, as some now claim?

Another theory – supported by pictures that later turned out to be fake – is that Trump was hit by a shard of glass thrown up from his shattered teleprompter.

The former president remains adamant that he took a bullet to the ear and last week the FBI belatedly confirmed that he was hit either by a bullet or ricochet.

Critics have said that Trump has inflamed the conspiracy theories with self-imposed secrecy.

He refuses to release medical information about his injury and nor will the doctors who treated him, citing patient confidentiality.

‘THERE WAS A SECOND SHOOTER’

Just as JFK’s 1963 assassination continues to be overshadowed by claims about a second gunman, so Trump’s shooting has inspired feverish talk of a mystery ‘second shooter’ – a possibility for which the FBI and Secret Service say there’s no evidence.

The most popular theory – supported by somewhat vague eyewitness accounts and very grainy video footage circulating online – is that another gunman was positioned on a nearby water tower. The video shows a fuzzy dark spot, possibly a shadow, at the top of the tower.

Posts showing the video have now been watched millions of times on X but sceptics point out that escaping from the prominently positioned tower would have been very difficult without being spotted.

Undeterred by such common-sense reservations, some claim the second gunman was there to silence Crooks, a ‘patsy’ in the plot, after the shooting had taken place.

Others say this figure was an expert marksman hired to graze Trump’s ear in a ‘false flag’ operation to fake an assassination attempt.

He would certainly have had to be an incredibly good shot to guarantee grazing Trump’s ear rather than blowing his brains out

‘Almost makes you think they let it happen and then got rid of the guy because dead men tell no tales,’ said John Mark Dougan, a former Florida sheriff’s deputy who backs the second shooter line. Dougan is also a pro-Kremlin influencer online.

The failure of investigators to come up with a convincing motive for the gunman has strengthened the hand of those who insist he was simply a dupe manipulated by others determined to kill Trump.

But who exactly?

As with Lee Harvey Oswald, opinions vary wildly. The CIA, Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, Ukraine, even transgender people angry at Trump’s intolerance have all been raised as possibilities. But, as of yet, with no supporting evidence.

Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson claims that video of the shooting ‘calls into question what the FBI is telling us about a single shooter.’ He, too, struggles to provide corroborating evidence – beyond mentioning a ‘pretty interesting video on the internet by experts’ he claims to have seen.