Trump supporters have seized on details of a recent cover of TIME Magazine to claim it was somehow involved in yesterday’s apparent assassination attempt on the former president.
The White House hopeful was playing golf at his course in Florida on Sunday when a man allegedly poked an AK-47-style rifle through a fence around 300 to 500 yards away.
The latest issue of the New York-based current affairs magazine, published four days earlier, shows a mock-up of a distressed Trump in his golf buggy, stuck in a sand bunker on a generic golf course.
The image is captioned with the words ‘In Trouble’.
Prominent far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who recently joined Trump on the campaign trail, posted in reply to an X post of the TIME cover : ‘Coincidence? Or coordination?’
‘It’s a photo of Donald Trump on the golf course with the words “In Trouble”.
‘Did they have advance knowledge of the attempted assassination of President Trump today at his golf club in West Palm Beach FL?!’
Thousands of users have shared the post, including a number of other profiles with large profiles in the MAGA-sphere.
One claimed TIME ‘activated’ the would-be shooter by giving him a ‘a message and instructions’.
Another page with two million followers posted a slew of posts with unsubstantiated suggestions of a wider conspiracy behind the golf course incident.
They include a post of the TIME cover, linked to the other claims, captioned: ‘PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THIS IMAGE TIME MAGAZINE POSTED 4 DAYS AGO ON 9/11’.
Another conspiracy theorist posted to his 100,000 followers: ‘Trump Assassination Attempt No2 was PREDICTED By TIME Magazine cover! These are MIND-BLOWING connections!’
Loomer, 31, has actively promoted debunked claims that 9/11 was an inside job.
Among other campaign appearances, she was allowed to join Trump at Ground Zero for a memorial to the tragedy.
She later posted a screenshot of a CNN headline reporting that Trump’s decision to play golf was last-minute, saying : ‘Really makes you wonder how the shooter knew where President Trump would be!’
Titled ‘How Kamala Harris knocked Donald Trump off course,’ the cover story makes no reference to any attempts to assassinate Trump, past or future.
It discusses how Ms Harris was widely perceived to have beaten Trump in the recent televised debate and has a slight but consistent lead in the polls.
She had a 2.6-point lead in the latest average of national polls, collated by FiveThirtyEight, though one more recent poll put this at 4 points.
A 58-year-old North Carolina native, Ryan Wesley Routh, has been named as the suspect arrested in connection with the incident.
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