Following Saturday night’s failed assassination attempt on President Trump, online sleuths and political skeptics scrutinized every detail of the incident and dug deep into the background of the alleged shooter, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen.
While some of the unearthed details are raising serious questions, several viral claims have already been debunked.
Alex Jones released two videos tackling rumors that the shooting was staged — even though reports confirm both a Secret Service agent and Allen were hit by gunfire, and the suspect was a registered Democrat with a strong anti-Trump history.
Jones made it clear he does not believe the event was fake, yet he was still savagely attacked by some hardcore Trump supporters simply for addressing the circulating theories.
Here are some of the strangest and most talked-about details circulating about the incident.
Please note: This is not an endorsement of these theories.
It is simply a record of what people investigating the shooting are currently debating online.
A particularly curious discovery is an 𝕏 account named Henry Martinez, created in December 2023. In nearly two and a half years, it had made only one post — the name “Cole Allen.”
Brian Krassenstein, a prominent liberal voice and Democratic operative, released a video dissecting the mysterious post. He observed that the Henry Martinez account had posted “Cole Allen” in December 2023 while using an image from a site called “Time Machine.”
The odd part? When superimposed over the now-famous image of Trump pumping his fist after surviving the July 2024 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, the two pictures align with uncanny accuracy.
Large social media accounts across the platform voiced shock at the peculiar coincidence, and some users began wondering aloud if the very same female Secret Service agent was involved in the middle of both assassination attempts against Trump.
Other accounts pointed out that a “Henry Martinez” is listed as an author on a NASA research paper from the exact period when Cole Allen was serving as an intern at the space agency.
Cole Allen once appeared in an ABC 7 news story about an emergency braking system for wheelchairs that he designed during his time as a student at Caltech.
‼️UNCOVERED: ABC News Interview From 2017 With Alleged SHOOTER Cole Thomas Allen—Notice His Mannerisms. 👀
— Project Constitution (@ProjectConstitu) April 26, 2026
Before he was the “lone wolf” gunman at the WHCD tonight, Cole Thomas Allen was a brilliant mechanical engineering student at Caltech. Watch this 2017 ABC7 clip: he’s an… https://t.co/NOAt0seLez pic.twitter.com/4iSENsrZB8
Some social media users speculated that the woman shown in the ABC7 report was Vice President J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha. The theory was swiftly shut down by Community Notes on 𝕏, which pointed out: “The woman in the video is not Usha Vance. In February 2017, Vance was clerking for the Supreme Court in D.C., not at this L.A. tech conference.”
Amateur researchers highlighted screenshots of Google Trends showing spikes in searches for “Cole Tomas Allen” across multiple countries in the days leading up to the incident.
Yep!
— Mark Ashcraft (@MarkAshcraftDDS) April 26, 2026
The shooter’s name was googled several times in ISRAEL BEFORE THE SHOOTING! 🇮🇱
Cole Tomas Allen. Did Israel know he was going to try to assassinate Trump?? pic.twitter.com/VCEkenWOLk
Google allegedly began adjusting and altering some of its search results shortly after the screenshots of the pre-shooting trends went viral.
Internet attention also focused on comments from Fox News journalist Aishah Hasnie, who was seated next to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Hasnie shared that Leavitt’s husband warned her, “You need to be very safe.”
“He was very serious and kind of looked around before saying, ‘There are some–’” she noted. Fox abruptly cut her live report mid-sentence, which significantly heightened the sense of suspicion surrounding the event.
Meanwhile, Karoline Leavitt told Fox News prior to the event that there would be “shots fired” the moment President Trump stepped on stage to roast mainstream media outlets and anchors.
Another detail that raised eyebrows online was the sighting of Oz “The Mentalist” Pearlman performing a trick for Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and First Lady Melania Trump at the exact moment the gunfire erupted.
Oz discussed the chaotic scene with CNN and told ABC News that at the time of the shooting, he was in the middle of a trick where he correctly guessed the name of Karoline Leavitt’s unborn baby.
One popular post recirculated footage of Oz guessing Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN on his podcast, suggesting the trick had carried an undertone of a “veiled threat” at the time.
It’s also worth noting that the Washington, D.C. Hilton Hotel hosting the dinner was the exact same location where John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
The most elaborate conspiracy theory gaining traction online alleges that President Trump is capitalizing on the shooting to overcome legal roadblocks to his proposed White House ballroom.
In a post-incident speech, Trump declared, “We need the ballroom… today’s a little bit different because today we need levels of security that probably nobody’s ever seen before.”
A widely shared TikTok video drew attention to the fact that Shalom Baranes Associates — a firm owned by Shalom Baranes, a Jewish immigrant from Libya known for designing synagogues — had just been awarded the design contract.
The video claimed the ballroom’s architectural layout looks nearly identical to the Temple of Solomon and linked it to Trump’s recent public reading of 2 Chronicles 7:11-22, which describes the dedication of Solomon’s Temple.
The narrator asked pointedly: “Is this a play to get the third temple built?” Many Christians see the rebuilding of the Third Temple as a critical step in biblical end-times prophecy.
