The worrisome assassination endeavor at former chair Donald Trump ’s rally in Pennsylvania is part of a long chronicle of political furiousness in the US .
The deadly shooting atTrump’scampaign rallyshocked the world as images of the former president bleeding and being rushed offstage by US Secret Service agents flooded the internet. The incident in Pennsylvania is the most recent in a number of assassination attempts on presidents throughout US history. Here are 11 instances:
1.On Jan. 30, 1835, former president Andrew Jackson survived an assassination attempt when a house painter — identified asRichard Lawrence— attempted to shoot Jackson with two different pistols, but both misfired. Jackson’s first line of defense against the attack was his very ownwalking cane. In the first known assassination attempt against a US president, Jackson took up his cane to attack his assailant.
2.Possibly the most famous political assassination of the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln wasfatally shotat the Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. While known for his wisdom and grave speech-making, Lincoln’s last words were a kind jest with his wife, Mary.
Coincidentally, Abraham Lincoln had approved the founding of theSecret Serviceon the very same day he was shot, but the agency was originally a branch of the Treasury Department intended to prevent counterfeiting schemes. The Secret Service was not assigned to protect the president’s safety until decades (and several presidential assassination attempts) later.
3.In 1881, just months into his presidency,President James Garfieldwas shot twice by an American civilian, Charles Guiteau, at a train station in Washington, DC. The first medical assistance President Garfield received after being shot was a swig of brandy administered by a nearby physician, Smith Townsend.
President Garfield’s slow decline from medical complications after the assassination attempt wasdocumentedextensively by the press, many attributing his death in September to improper care by his surgeons, notably Dr. Willard Bliss. Other medical officials publicly critiqued the surgical care team for failing to clean the wound properly and extract the bullet inside Garfield. In the wake of the president’s death, newspaper headlines read,“Ignorance is Bliss.”
Later, Alexander Graham Bellinventeda metal detector to try to find the bullets that entered President Garfield, but the invention was unsuccessful at locating the bullets because the president was lying on ametal springbed frame during its use.
4.Six months seems to be a theme:President William McKinleywas assassinated only half a year into his second term as president, suffering two shots to the chest. The man who killed him, Leon Czolgosz, shot at point-blank range following a speech McKinley gave at an open music hall during the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition.
The first person to disarm McKinley’s assassinator was not a Secret Service agent or policeman, butJames “Big Jim” Parker, a civilian attending the event. However, because Parker was Black, his heroic intervention was politicized, discounted, and almost lost to history.
5.President Trump is the second former president to face an assassination attempton the campaign trail. In 1912, at a speaking event in Wisconsin, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a “lone wolf” assailant. The former president was miraculously saved by a50-page folded copy of the speechhe planned to give that he had tucked in his coat pocket.
6.At a speaking event in Miami during the height of the Great Depression, President-Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt was the target of shooter GiuseppeZangara. According to PBS' WTTW, a civilian obstructed Zangara’s shot at Franklin D. Roosevelt, seemingly sending his shots in another direction.Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who was standing near the president during his speech, was shot instead along withfour others. Roosevelt, however, was not injured.
Giuseppe Zangara’s attempt to kill FDR resulted in him receiving the death sentence, and theswiftest trialand execution in 20th-century American history.
7.In the wake of an assassination attempt onHarry S. Trumanby members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, former president Herbert Hoover senta letterto the president, assuring that “assassination is not part of the American way of life.” Ironically,Hooverhad contended with his own thwarted assassination attempt during a visit to Argentina.
8.According to theWarren Commissionreport, JFK’s assassin was a serial danger to democratic leaders. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated byLee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, living there for three years before returning to Texas with his family. Less than a year before shooting the president, Oswald had attempted to shoot and kill an outspoken critic of communism, retired United StatesMajor General Edwin A. Walker.
9.In 1981, an assassination attempt was made onPresident Ronald Reaganby a lone gunman hiding among press and television crews waiting for the president’s exit from a speaking event at the Washington Hilton Hotel. John Hinckley reportedly fired six shots, injuring the president as well as his press secretary, Thomas S. Brady, and two law enforcement officers, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and DC policeman Thomas K. Delahanty.
All survived, and despite his rather severe gunshot wound, the then-president wasreportedly cracking jokesto his wife at George Washington University Hospital, saying, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” While laying in a hospital cart awaiting surgery, Reagan said to hisWhite House counselor, “Who’s minding the store?” And to hospital staff, he joked, “Please, tell me you’re Republicans.”
10.In 1993, a plan to assassinate former presidentGeorge H. W. Bushwas uncovered by US intelligence when a car bomb was found in Kuwait City. This international attempt sparked a missile strike ordered by President Clinton against Iraqi Intelligence who the FBI had linked to the near-fatal effort in their investigation. Luckily, US intelligence officers caught 14 of the would-be perpetrators of the plotted attack before plans could be carried out.
11.And finally, Obama’s attempted assassin reportedly believed he was “the modern-day Jesus.”Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, a 21-year-old from Idaho, used a semi-automatic assault rifle to open fire on the White House from a moving vehicle in 2011. Luckily, the Obamas were out of town, and no one was injured in the attack.
