Donald Trump and other US presidential figures who have suffered attacks

Former President Donald Trump is not the first current or former US president to suffer an assassination attempt. There have been numerous attempts on the lives of US leaders throughout the country’s history, but there has not been an incident of this severity since 1981.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

RONALD REAGAN: In 1981, President Ronald Reagan had been in office for just a few months when he was shot as he left a Hilton hotel in Washington. His attacker, a disturbed fan of actress Jodie Foster, fired a bullet that entered his armpit and lodged in his lung, but did not hit his heart or endanger his life. Within a month, Reagan was back in the White House.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: The most shocking assassination attempt of the contemporary era took place two decades earlier, on November 22, 1963, in this case in Dallas, when President John Fitzerald Kennedy was riding in an open-top limousine waving to the public and was fatally shot from a nearby apartment by Lee Harvey Oswald. The assassin was fatally shot two days later and the plot that led to Kennedy’s death was never clarified.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT: In 1912, when Roosevelt had already left the presidency but was still an enormously popular man, he was ambushed outside the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee by a man named John Schrank, a tavern owner and allegedly unbalanced. The bullet remained in Roosevelt’s chest without reaching his heart. In fact, ‘Teddy’ lived seven more years.

WILLIAM MCKINLEY: In 1901, President McKinley was attending a concert in Buffalo, New York, when he was shot twice in the abdomen by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, who later wrote that he had killed McKinley because he was “an enemy of good working people.”

XIX CENTURY

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: In 1865, President Lincoln was at Ford’s Theatre in Washington when he was shot in the back of the head by a Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln’s assassination did not prevent the Federals from winning the war a month later.

JAMES GARFIELD: In 1881, newly elected President James A. Garfield was at Washington’s Potomac Station when he was shot by Charles Guiteau, who turned out to be a mentally ill man. Garfield was shot twice, and survived for 10 more weeks before dying.

In addition to those mentioned above, the secret services have foiled numerous plots to kill other sitting presidents, in more or less elaborate plans. These plots, or at least those that have become known, have targeted Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, among the best known of the last century.