The planet’s biggest sporting event, the World Cup final, will take place this summer in MetLife Stadium, which is presently known as New York New Jersey Stadium because FIFA has strict rules on corporate branding. The stadium—whatever you want to call it—is located in the marshlands of New Jersey, about nine miles from Midtown Manhattan. On the day of the final, as on the dates of seven other matches throughout the World Cup tournament, an estimated 80,000 fans will converge at its gates.

But how will they get there? Some will drive, even though they’ll have to pay $225 to use one of the 5,000 available parking spots at a nearby shopping mall that is connected to the stadium area by pedestrian bridges. Others will buy a seat on a shuttle bus—originally $80, cut to $20 after last-minute maneuvering by New York Governor Kathy Hochul. (Some of these will be yellow school buses.) Or they will cough up whatever amount ride-share apps are charging on those days. And the rest—up to 40,000 people for each event—will take their chances on an infrequently used branch of New Jersey Transit that has struggled with large crowds in the past.

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In the coming months, America’s patchwork railway system will be similarly challenged—and its weaknesses exposed—across all 11 U.S. sites of World Cup matches. In Dallas, most people who are going to the stadium will either have to pay for expensive parking or take a commuter rail to a charter bus. Kansas City will rely entirely on charter buses. Where direct rail access is available, the trains aren’t likely to be convenient, and tickets may be outrageously expensive. New Jersey is a case in point: Last month, NJ Transit announced plans to charge $150 for each round-trip journey on a route that would otherwise cost less than $13.

That price was later reduced to $105, thanks to donations from various unnamed companies, then reduced again to $98 just before tickets went on sale—but the fact of any of these fares suggests a deeper problem. NJ Transit President and CEO Kris Kolluri explained the dismal math behind this pricing at a press conference in April, alluding to the agency’s enormous debt and degrading equipment. To transport all of those people to the stadium, he said, the agency would need to spend about $6 million a game, mostly for labor and security, as well as for maintenance work on 50 railcars; this would include the purchase of new wheels, axles, and air-conditioning units “to make sure that we don’t have the challenges we typically do.” Such costs could be passed on to New Jersey taxpayers, Kolluri pointed out, but “no one that I have spoken to thinks that that’s (1) fair and (2) reasonable.” So instead, the agency has done some simple arithmetic: $6 million in operating expenses divided by 40,000 riders equals $150.

From the start, the situation has had all the makings of a political brouhaha. When FIFA complained that the fare was too expensive, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill argued that the association, which stands to bring in $11 billion in revenue from the tournament, should subsidize or cover the fares itself. A FIFA official shot back that the hiked-up fares would “diminish the economic benefit and lasting legacy the entire region stands to gain from hosting the World Cup.” Then the New York Post’s editorial board took issue with NJ Transit’s plan to close off its section of Manhattan’s Penn Station for long stretches on match days, arguing that the agency was “dissing” its regular riders. Separately, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro boasted that fans could get to and from the matches held in Philadelphia using the region’s SEPTA rail system for just $2.90.

Kolluri said that NJ Transit’s special challenges justify the (much, much) higher fare. The Philadelphia stadium is in the city, for example, and SEPTA trains already go there every day. MetLife Stadium, however, has no regular train service. It “is a suburban stadium,” he said, which is “very different fundamentally.” Isn’t that the problem, though? Europeans have lately been wondering on social media why this stadium was constructed where it is in the first place—stranded miles from the city center and encircled by highways, parking lots and swamps—and nobody has been able to supply them with a good answer. It’s just how we like it!

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One reporter asked Kolluri about the 2014 Super Bowl, held in the same location, also with approximately 80,000 people in attendance. NJ Transit did not raise fares anywhere near as much for that game, he pointed out. “First of all, do you know what happened in the Super Bowl?” Kolluri snapped. “I think you’re the only guy who may not know what actually happened.” What happened was widely reported travel chaos: Long lines and delays, and at one point, a request that people stay inside the stadium until some portion of the crowd dispersed from the train platform. The event went so poorly that the agency commissioned an independent investigation of its failures. Kolluri described all of this as having caused “PTSD,” and said that the situation was a reason to do things very differently this year. “People think about that moment and say we can never let that happen again,” he said. (People did, in fact, let that happen again in 2019, when thousands of fans got stuck waiting for hours in the darkness for a NJ Transit ride after a WrestleMania event.)

The $150-a-ticket pricing, Kolluri argued, was only what would be needed to prevent catastrophe. “I think that’s a defensible claim,” says Zoe Baldwin, the vice president of state programs at the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit focused on economic development and quality of life in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. “We have a very old system that is in desperate need of overhaul, let alone maintenance.” Equipment failures are more common in the summer, she told me, so NJ Transit will have to spend on back-up crews and engines in case any trains are taken out of service. She seemed optimistic about the agency’s ability to handle the tournament crowds, and she emphasized that the trip out to the stadium would be a great opportunity for people all over the world to get a look at one of the country’s biggest and most fascinating urban wetlands. When I asked her whether those same people might be horrified by the look they get at New Jersey’s tangle of unwalkable roadways and parking lots, she protested: “What are they going to think when they go to L.A., then?”

To her point, the most public drama over World Cup transportation until now has occurred in a region that has better public-transit options than any other part of the United States does. The railway infrastructure throughout the Northeast may be old and shoddy—for example, Amtrak service between New York and Boston was recently suspended because pieces of a highway on-ramp had fallen onto the tracks—but at least it exists. Just two World Cup host cities in the U.S.—Seattle and San Francisco—have an Amtrak station anywhere near their stadium. In Houston, where fans can take the city’s light-rail system, two of the relevant lines run only once every 12 minutes. In Los Angeles, the matches will be accessible via shuttle-bus service from designated Metro drop-off points. Even back East in Philadelphia, where SEPTA service goes directly to the stadium, the system will be strained: A spokesperson estimated that that line can transport 15,000 people an hour, but twice that many are expected to take a train to each match.

When I asked Jim Mathews, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Rail Passengers Association, about his impressions of the various host cities’ transportation plans, he complimented the Los Angeles strategy on the grounds that it would be affordable and temporarily link several independent transit systems. But he did not agree with the triple-digit price tag for NJ Transit rides, or the $80 fares for those who take a train from Boston to a match at Gillette Stadium. “You’re taking this moment when the spotlight of the world is on you, and you’re making it stupidly expensive,” he told me. “It just shows you what happens when you go for decades underinvesting in capacity.”

Mathews said he’s worried that visitors from overseas will be shocked when they arrive in the U.S. and get a look at its trains. Although some cities here now have more transit options than they did a few years ago, tourists may still be disappointed by the scarcity of options. And despite Americans’ dramatic increase in interest in soccer over the past three decades, he expected we’d be embarrassed on the field too: “We are still going to exit in the first round.”

Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on April 29, 2026

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Within hours of the gunfire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night—and initial, erroneous reports that the shooter had been killed—the usual swirl of misinformation and rumor was swirling in a particular direction. The event was staged, people said.

More than 300,000 posts containing the word staged were shared on X before midday on Sunday, according to an analysis cited by The New York Times. Some of those were probably saying that, actually, the event was not staged, but still: People with substantial social-media followings (including some celebrities) were raising questions. They drew attention to a clip of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt from just before the dinner, laughing as she previewed her boss’s speech: “There will be some shots fired tonight in the room.” Others, in the style of pop-music stan accounts, grabbed photos of President Trump and other members of the administration, taken just before the shooting, in which one might find evidence of knowing smirks or other telling body language. Some of these posts were viewed millions of times.

The conspiracy theorists also latched on to a video pulled from Fox News’s live broadcast, in which the reporter Aishah Hasnie, calling from inside the Hilton hotel that hosted the event, told the anchor that she had been speaking with Leavitt’s husband right before the shooting started. “You need to be very safe,” she said he’d told her. “And he was very serious when he said that to me, and he kind of looked around the room and he said there are some—” Then the call dropped. Hasnie clarified in a post on X that cell service had been spotty in the ballroom, but her explanation, delivered at 1:30 in the morning, was not as widely viewed as posts suggesting that Fox had cut her feed before she could reveal what her source had gone on to say. (“There are some … people in here who are going to fake an attempt on the president’s life but with live ammunition”?)

A potential motive for a staged assassination attempt was quickly floated too. Less than two weeks earlier, a federal judge had ruled that Trump could not justify his plan to build a ballroom by saying it was necessary for security reasons. Now he had a perfect counterpoint: “This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” he posted on Truth Social, his social-media platform, on Sunday. Some of the last large #Resistance Twitter accounts started circulating collages of all the posts from Trump allies who were arguing the same point, in suspiciously similar ways. Yesterday, three GOP senators pressed again for funding for the ballroom, and the Justice Department filed a bizarre motion backing the project with Trumpian rhetoric (asserting that any opponents must have “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”).

Among the highly online left, some stated as fact that the whole event had been a ploy to get the ballroom. To some MAGA influencers, it was equally clear that Trump’s enemies had been pushing back on the ballroom plans all along, with the intention of causing his death. “The Democrat judges who stopped the construction of a White House ballroom did so to enable an assassination of Trump,” the far-right internet personality Mike Cernovich wrote, apparently in earnest. I also saw one person with almost 300,000 followers try to tie the shooting to a recent, roundly debunked story about a bunch of scientists who were supposedly mysteriously “missing.”

All of this has echoes of the many conspiracy theories that surrounded an earlier attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. That incident left behind a long trail of speculation and rumor, including a debate over whether the president was lying about the fact that a bullet struck his right ear. (Some still post photos of the president and insist that his cartilage appears to be intact.) Then, as now, a contingent of observers claimed that the whole thing had been invented to help Trump—in that case, to make his polling numbers go up, which they didn’t. Now, apparently, the Trump administration was going back to the same playbook. Or maybe Saturday’s attempt was staged and the one in Butler wasn’t? Or vice versa? It was “highly possible” that the Butler shooting had been staged, the author Joyce Carol Oates said in a post on Sunday afternoon, but the previous night’s shooting seemed legit. Later that day, her perception had shifted: “He knew the script,” she wrote, in reference to one Cabinet official who was in attendance at the dinner.

Reached for comment, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in an email, “Anyone who thinks President Trump staged his own assassination attempts is a complete moron.” But how many people fit into this category? Do a meaningful number of Americans actually believe that the president was part of a (successful) plot to fake one or more attempted murders in order to consolidate his power (and build a ballroom)?

Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida’s law school who writes about government transparency and conspiracy theories, told me this would be hard to know. Social media makes conspiracy theories more visible, he said, but may not reflect their actual popularity. Public-opinion polls would provide a better view, but these can fail to capture how committed people are to the positions they claim to hold. “If you ask someone who isn’t particularly well informed or doesn’t care that much but doesn’t like or trust Trump, they might say, Yeah, it’s staged,” Fenster told me. “That doesn’t mean they’re a conspiracy theorist who really believes it.”

The historian Kathryn Olmsted, who surveyed the history of American paranoia in her 2009 book, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, told me that prior assassination plots have not all produced the same quantity of disbelief. (As Fenster noted to me, successful ones generally produce more.) In 1975, a time of notable distrust of government and widespread concern about the secret machinations of the state, two attempts were made on Gerald Ford’s life in the space of three weeks. “There was abundant media coverage of both attempts, but I don’t think I’ve seen evidence of anyone thinking he was responsible for the plots himself,” Olmsted said. In 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan outside the same Hilton hotel that hosted Saturday’s dinner, but that incident didn’t produce many conspiracy theories either. People seemed to take Hinckley at face value when he said he’d acted to impress the young actor Jodie Foster.

Olmsted also pointed out that political assassinations used to be far more common in America than they are today, and that the Secret Service greatly improved its security measures in the 1980s. Given the frequency of these events in earlier eras, she said, people may have been less inclined to invest any one of them with secret meaning. “I think most Americans just assumed there were plenty of mentally ill people who wanted to kill someone famous.”

But that’s not all that’s different. Trump is different, too. He’s a prolific liar with a well-established love for spectacle, and from the day he entered the political sphere, he has repeated and encouraged conspiracy theories of many stripes. It comes as no surprise that he’s at the center of one.

This article originally stated that Aishah Hasnie had been speaking with President Trump right before the shooting started. In fact, the quote provided was from Karoline Leavitt's husband.