Last Saturday, Donald Trump narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet. Two days later, delegates gathered in Milwaukee to officially make him the Republican nominee for president.

From what little we know about the shooter, it’s possible that his motivations had less to do with politics than a desire to shoot someone famous and go out in a blaze of glory.

But no one at the Republican National Convention (RNC) seemed to be capable of remembering that. Ben Carson, for example, rattled off the trials the former president had endured, saying that “first they tried to ruin his reputation,” and later “they tried to imprison him,” and then “they tried to bankrupt him,” and most recently “they tried to kill him.” In this telling, Trump was shot not by a twenty-year-old registered Republican with unclear motives but by a shadowy They.