What questions remain about the shooting is what caused the catastrophic failure of the Secret Service to secure the Trump rally location, and who allowed a 20-year-old would-be assassin to bring a rifle onto the roof of a nearby building with a line of sight to Trump.

Reid branded the attempted assassination a "photo op" and complained about her lack of knowledge.

Her speculations included, "We don't know why, for nine full seconds, Donald Trump was allowed to stand back up during an active shooting. Even though they at that point had said the shooter was down, how would they have known if there were more shooters or not? There could have been five shooters for all they knew. 'Yet, they allowed him to stand up in the middle of that crisis, and pose for a photo, and fist pump the air, so he could get the iconic photo."

The Mail report noted, "Conservative commentator Kenny Webster slammed Reid's insinuation that the shooting may have been staged, drawing comparisons with Alex Jones' legal battle over his outrageous Sandy Hook remarks."

"Alex Jones was fined $1.5 billion for his comments on Sandy Hook. How is this any different? Fine Joy Reid and seize MSNBC's studio equipment," he said.

The reality is that Trump raised his fist for only a moment as he was bundled, by the Secret Service, into an SUV.

Reid continued, demanding to know "What is the actual injury to Donald Trump's ear?"

"Why isn't the New York Times like aggressively pursuing his medical records? It's just weird, just a strange thing that I've noticed."

Reid's conspiracies also seemed to be spreading. A report at the Free Beacon pointed out that the "conspiracy theory" is running wild.

"It's a baseless conspiracy theory disproven by reams of documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts. And it's a belief held by one-third of the Democratic electorate," the report said.

It documented, "One in three registered Democrats believe it is 'credible' that the shooting Saturday in Butler, Pa., was staged and not intended to kill Trump, according to a Morning Consult poll."

It continued, "The findings show that large swaths of the Democratic base have fallen prey to the phenomenon known as 'BlueAnon,' a play on the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory that once gripped portions of the Republican base and served as an obsession of the mainstream media throughout the first Trump administration. But the Morning Consult poll shows that BlueAnon adherents among the Democratic base far outnumber their QAnon counterparts on the right. The poll showed that 34 percent of Democratic voters found it either definitely or probably credible that Trump staged Saturday's shooting."

The flames of falsehood have been "fanned," the report said, by those including Democratic powerbroker and Joe Biden ally Dmitri Mehlhorn, who told reporters within hours of the event to "portray the shooting as a false-flag operation straight from Vladimir Putin's playbook, designed to give Trump a good photo opportunity."

Further, the report said, "Jeff Tiedrich, a liberal social media influencer with 1.1 million followers who attended an Oct. 2022 White House influencer summit to coordinate midterm election messaging with the Biden administration, on Monday posted a Substack screed 'connecting some weird dots' surrounding the shooting."

He charged, "What the —- is going on under that bandage? And why is the press so disinterested in finding out?" he ranted.