Trump 'staged assassination attempts'

NEW YORK, Sept 22 (BBC/Reuters): Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.

About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.

The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.

Their views on the shooting in July and the apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.

I travelled to Colorado - which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen - for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.

Dozens of evidence-free posts I found suggesting both incidents were staged have racked up more than 30 million views on X. Some of these posts came from anti-Trump accounts that did not seem to have a track record of sharing theories like this, while a smaller share were posted by some of the former president's supporters.

Rjects Harris' challenge

to debate again

Donald Trump on Saturday rejected another debate with Vice President Kamala Harris before the US presidential election, hours after the Democratic candidate's campaign said she had agreed to an Oct 23 matchup with her Republican rival on CNN.

"Vice President Harris is ready for another opportunity to share a stage with Donald Trump, and she has accepted CNN's invitation to a debate on October 23. Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate," Jen O'Malley Dillon, the chair of the Harris campaign, said in a statement.

Trump stuck to his previous position that there would not be another debate before voters go to the polls in the Nov 5 election.

"The problem with another debate is that it's just too late. Voting has already started," the former U.S. president told supporters at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Harris and Trump debated each other for the first time on Sept 10, in a contest that polls showed she won.

Trump debated President Joe Biden in June.