The assassination attempt on former president and now candidate Donald Trump has shocked the United States, prompted an immediate reaction from the entire political class, and brought out all the ghosts. The last assassination attempt on a president, or a presidential hopeful, with real consequences dates back to 1981 when John Hinckley Jr, a disturbed individual obsessed with actress Jodie Foster, then a teenager who had just starred in Taxi Driver, shot at point-blank range at the presidential entourage at the Hilton hotel in Washington.
Hinckley Jr, who wanted to get Foster's attention, managed to hit Reagan, but also wounded a police officer and a Secret Service agent, leaving White House press secretary James Brady in a wheelchair. His name is forever associated with assassins or would-be assassins, alongside the most famous in history: Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed John F. Kennedy, and John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin.
Unfortunately, the country's history is filled with high-level political violence. The first president to narrowly escape was Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. Four died in office: Lincoln in 1865; James A. Garfield just 16 years later in 1881. William McKinley in 1901, already in the 20th century. And JFK, whose death is still subject to controversy, conspiracies, investigations, and publications. In addition to them, two were wounded, the aforementioned Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
Furthermore, recent years have been dangerous. In May of last year, Sai Varshith Kandula, a 19-year-old from Missouri, was arrested after crashing a truck into the White House facade. He was nowhere near the president, but stated his intention was to kill him.
Three years earlier, in 2020, the FBI thwarted a conspiracy by far-right extremists and supremacists who planned to kidnap and kill Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan and now one of the prominent names within the Democratic Party as a potential future candidate. In 2028 or even this 2024 if Joe Biden were to resign due to public pressure.
"As someone whose family has been a victim of political violence, I firsthand know that any form of political violence has no place in our society. I thank God that former President Trump is safe. As we learn more details about this horrific incident, let us pray that all those who attended the former president's rally today come out unharmed," said Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives and a leader of the Democratic Party, whose husband was attacked by David DePape, a man who broke into their home looking for her and attacked him with a hammer.
"Political violence is terrifying. I know it well. I hold former President Trump and all affected by today's indefensible act of violence in my heart. Political violence is un-American and never acceptable... never," tweeted Gabrielle Giffords, Democratic congresswoman from Arizona from 2007 to 2012, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011, in Casas Adobes, where six people, including a federal judge, died.
The Reuters agency estimated that between the Capitol assault in 2021 and 2023, there were at least 213 cases of political violence in the United States. There are incidents of significant importance, starting with the attack on one of the symbols of sovereignty, which resulted in five deaths. Only one by police gunfire, but the rest linked in the aftermath, according to the official investigation.
The Reuters report states that we are currently experiencing the most tense and violent period since the 1970s, with neighbors killing each other over political beliefs or radicals opening fire at demonstrations, as happened in 2022 in Portland, resulting in one death and four injuries. Or the 10 African Americans who died at the hands of a supremacist in Buffalo, New York, that same year.
Political violence increased for nearly a decade starting in the late 1960s; in 1970 alone, there were over 450 cases, according to academics. Since 1980, it decreased, despite the Reagan assassination attempt. The 1990s saw some peaks, especially the savage bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people, the worst act of domestic terrorism in the country. Political violence began to rise again in 2016, according to experts consulted by Reuters, and "it does not seem like we have reached the peak of the wave yet."