Was the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump earlier this month part of a secret CIA program involving brainwashed killers? That’s the claim being made by some far-right accounts on X, but the U.S. intelligence agency is taking the unusual step of directly and forcefully denying the claims.
When it was revealed in the 1970s that the CIA had tried to develop a mind-manipulation program called MKUltra, it sounded like the most absurd conspiracy theory around. Unfortunately, it turned out to be true, even if the suggestive results of the program–and potential for creating Manchurian Candidate-like killers–have been exaggerated in the subsequent decades.
But MKUltra has become quite a meme in the 2020s, with many conspiracy theorists jumping into the fray after Trump was shot at by a 20-year-old during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. The shooter was identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks who acted alone. But some people on social media are trying to claim Crooks was somehow trained by the CIA under an MKUltra program to go after Trump.
“What if US President Joe Biden’s ‘mean tweets’ triggered Thomas Matthew Crooks?” one X account that goes by the name Real Global News tweeted a couple days after the shooting. “Yes like an #MKUltra test subject. I dont want to go into conspiracy theories here but the CIA did mind control experiments like the #ManchurianCandidate. Wait for the trigger before acting.”
Another account with the handle @MJTruthUltra tweeted “MKUltra anyone?” with a list of supposedly suspicious claims about Crooks and the way local police handled the investigation into the assassination attempt against Trump.
The CIA, for its part, decided to push back very publicly against these claims, something the agency doesn’t often do when weird conspiracy theories are floating around on the internet.
“These claims are utterly false, absurd, and damaging,” a CIA spokesperson told Gizmodo on Thursday. “The CIA had no relationship whatsoever with Thomas Crooks. Regarding MKULTRA, the CIA’s program was shut down more than 40 years ago, and declassified information about the program is publicly available on CIA.gov.”
The CIA’s denial, first reported by Wired and confirmed by Gizmodo after we reached out, suggests the agency is perhaps now more willing to engage with the public after so many decades of those stereotypical “no comment” or Glomar responses on just about everything.
It’s not surprising that Trump supporters would float conspiracy theories like the idea that Crooks was part of the MKUltra program. It’s really their entire brand. Trump himself has fanned the flames of ridiculous conspiracy theories over the years, often pushing dog-whistles that QAnon is real. Believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory think there’s a secret cabal of Democratic politicians and Hollywood power players who are drinking the blood of children while engaging in ritual torture and rape. And the only person who can save those kids from that fate is… none other than Donald Trump, the sex criminal with ties to Jeffrey Epstein that date back decades.
Trump supporters may be some of the dumbest people on the planet, but it’s easy to see why even normal people can believe conspiracy theories. There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens in the world, and sometimes those rumors turn out to be true.
Fundamentally, the MKUltra program was focused on ways to mentally break people who were being interrogated. Test subjects were sometimes given mind-altering drugs without their knowledge and the program included countless other abuses, including sexual assault and torture. And while that’s all horrific enough, the CIA never created a Manchurian Candidate that could be programmed to go kill whoever the agency wanted dead. At least to the best of anyone’s knowledge based on the thousands of pages of records that have been uncovered.
But obviously, when rampant abuse of human beings occurs at the hands of the U.S. government, people are ready to take those ideas and run with them to all kinds of other areas in our lives.
We still don’t have a known motive for why Crooks shot at Trump.
