A campaign season already rife with threats and insults is now tainted by deadly violence, the latest dark chapter in a polarized America.
Former President Trump was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, an attack that appeared poised to upend a heated presidential race and eerily evoked attempts on past candidates’ lives. Among them were Theodore Roosevelt and Gerald R. Ford.
Video of the event showed Trump grabbing his right ear and falling to the ground after the gunshots were fired. Trump quickly stood up amid a phalanx of U.S. Secret Service agents and shook his fist at the crowd, with blood seeping from the side of his head.
Shortly after Trump was removed from the stage by security, a spokesman for the Republican candidate said he was “fine” and was being checked out at a nearby medical facility. The shooting left one rally attendee dead and two others seriously injured, with the unidentified gunman killed by the Secret Service, according to the agency.
Political leaders of all stripes condemned the attack. President Biden said in a statement that he was “pleased to hear the news.” [Trump’s] Safe and performing well. My prayers go out to him and his family and to all who attended the rally.
The history of violence in presidential campaigns goes back more than a hundred years. Perhaps the most high-profile attack was the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, then a leading candidate in the Democratic presidential primary. The shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was a defining moment in an era of acrimony in America.
While assassinations of presidents or presidential candidates have not happened for more than 40 years, recent history is littered with examples of political violence, including Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana’s appearance in Congress Shot dead during a baseball game practice in 2017; 2022, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was brutally attacked at the Democratic congressman’s San Francisco home, and the riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 .
“Unfortunately, political violence is a fact of our time,” said Alan Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University.
In a campaign filled with invective — Trump called Biden a “rag-tag piece of garbage” and Democrats called his challenger a “fool” and a “loser” — political violence was a feature from the start. part of the discussion. Part of the reason is that on January 6, insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of votes in the 2020 presidential election.
Throughout the campaign, Biden has sought to tie Trump to the actions of the rioters. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this month that the president enjoys absolute immunity in the exercise of core powers, casting doubt on prosecutors’ ability to hold the former president accountable for actions they say upended Biden’s victory.
It was the first shooting of a president or presidential candidate since John W. Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Like several presidential candidates he has targeted before, Trump was attacked at a political rally, underscoring the risks of campaigning.
In 1912, while running for a third presidential term, Theodore Roosevelt was shot before speaking at an event in Milwaukee. Roosevelt, who had a bullet in his chest, continued to speak and famously quipped: “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” a reference to his party’s nickname.
President Ford, who became president in 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, was the target of a succession of assassination attempts. They took place over 17 days in September 1975, when Ford visited California about a year before the election in which he sought but ultimately lost.
In the first episode, Ford sat down with the then-governor in downtown Sacramento. Jerry Brown. As he walked toward the meeting, the president stopped to shake hands with those who lined up to greet him. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, stood out in the crowd wearing a long red dress. Ford walked over and shook Fromm’s hand. Instead, she pointed the pistol at his stomach. One of Ford’s Secret Service agents saw the weapon and grabbed it before it exploded. Ford was taken to the Capitol, where he met with Brown.
Less than three weeks later, Sarah Jane Moore shot Ford as he left a speaking engagement at a San Francisco hotel. Moore is a former FBI informant who had been treated for mental illness and was reportedly interested in radical politics. Her shot missed the president by several feet.
A year after surviving the assassination attempt, Ford was defeated by Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter.
Eric Schickler, a political science professor and co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the Trump shooting may shock some people, in part because many Americans don’t remember countless high-profile Political assassination versus frustrated political assassination.
“In 1975,” Schickler said of the attempt on Ford’s life, “it was still the aftermath of the 1960s, where you had John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. … and Lots of political bombings and bombings.
“In many ways, this is a very different moment than we are now,” he said. “This is beyond what many Americans have experienced.”
The murder of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968 was an epochal moment. Kennedy, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, delivered a speech at the ambassador’s office to commemorate his victory in the California primary. As Kennedy left the stage and exited through the kitchen, he was confronted by Sirhan Sirhan, who shot him three times with a .22 caliber revolver.
Kennedy was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, where he was pronounced dead the next day. The assassination occurred on the anniversary of the Six-Day War between Israel and Arab states. Sirhan was born in Palestine to a Christian family and grew up in Pasadena, and is believed to have been inspired by Kennedy’s pro-Israel stance.
The embassy was demolished in 2006; thereafter, a public school complex was built on the site and named after Kennedy.
Third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the late politician’s children, took to social media to appeal for calm after Trump’s shooting.
“Now is the time for every American who loves our country to step back from division, renounce all violence, and unite to pray for President Trump and his family,” Kennedy Jr. said on
Lichtman, the American University professor, said it was too early to assess the political impact of Saturday’s shooting. But he expressed concern that Republicans would use the attack to attack Democrats, risking “the risk of inciting more political violence.”
“It’s the height of irresponsibility to politicize this and blame it on the president, the former president’s political opponents, Joe Biden and the Democrats when we know nothing about the shooter or the motive,” Leachman said. “This is beyond tragic. The only result is more political violence.”
