Police put up tape at the baseball field where shots were fired during a congressional baseball practice, wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise in 2017.Mike Theiler/Reuters
On a Wednesday morning in June, 2017, an Illinois man with an axe to grind against then-president Donald Trump and his Republican Party opened fire on a group of Republican legislators on a Washington-area baseball diamond.
Steve Scalise, then the Republican whip in the House of Representatives – and now majority leader – was shot in the hip and critically injured, along with five other people. The gunman, James Hodgkinson, was mortally wounded in a gunfight with Mr. Scalise’s bodyguards.
Before Saturday’s attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump, that mass shooting was the most recent example of a high-level U.S. politician injured by gunfire in an act of political violence. But it was by no means the only such incident in recent years in this increasingly politically polarized country.
What we know so far about the Trump assassination attempt
Other, more recent incidents did not involve gunfire. On Jan. 6, 2021, rioters at the U.S. Capitol chanted “hang Mike Pence” and “where’s Nancy?” – in reference to then-vice president Mike Pence and then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi – as they hunted lawmakers through the hallways. Mr. Pence and all members of the Senate and House managed to escape to secure areas under the building before rioters could reach them.
A mob of supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump storm the Capitol Building in 2021.Leah Millis/Reuters
In October, 2022, a Canadian man named David DePape broke into Ms. Pelosi’s San Francisco house in a bid to kidnap her. She was not at home, so he attacked her husband, Paul, with a hammer. Mr. DePape, a conspiracy theorist living in California, had said “where’s Nancy?” as he searched the house for her. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the crime.
In October, 2020, a group of men were arrested for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in retaliation for her imposition of COVID-19 restrictions. Nine of them have since been convicted in connection with the plot.
Gabby Giffords in 2019.Joshua Roberts/Getty Images
“Political violence is terrifying. I know,” Gabby Giffords wrote on social media on Saturday. She was an Arizona member of the U.S. House of Representatives when she was shot in the head in 2011. She survived, but with partial paralysis.
“I’m holding former President Trump, and all those affected by today’s indefensible act of violence in my heart,” Ms. Giffords wrote. “Political violence is un-American and is never acceptable – never.”
Political violence, however, has been such a constant in the U.S. that the presidency is arguably one of the country’s most dangerous jobs.
Four presidents have been assassinated: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy.
The assassinations of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. McKinley were explicitly ideological. In Mr. Lincoln’s case, the gun was wielded by a Confederate sympathizer during the Civil War. In the case of Mr. McKinley, the shooter was an anarchist at a time of anti-capitalist foment. The assassination of Mr. Garfield was motivated by the frustrated career ambitions of his killer, who was angry the president had refused to give him a diplomatic appointment. The motivation for the Kennedy assassination is hotly debated.
Police and Secret Service agents respond during the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981.Mike Evens/The Associated Press
The causes of other assassination attempts have varied widely. John Schrank, who tried to kill Theodore Roosevelt, claimed a ghost had ordered him to do it. John Hinckley Jr., who shot and seriously wounded Ronald Reagan, sought to impress actress Jodie Foster.
Mr. Reagan, who was shot in the chest outside a Washington hotel in 1981, a little over two months into his first term, was the most recent president to have been injured in an assassination attempt before Saturday.
The attempt on Mr. Roosevelt came during the 1912 election campaign, when he unsuccessfully tried to reclaim the presidency after being out of office for a term.
He was shot while campaigning in Milwaukee and, as the bullet was absorbed by his eyeglass case and a copy of his speech in his breast pocket, he was able to go ahead with his planned campaign stop. “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” he said.
Another campaign-trail assassination attempt happened in 1972, when then-Alabama governor George Wallace was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. Wallace was shot four times while stumping at a shopping centre in Laurel, Md., a Washington suburb. He survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.
Alabama Gov. George Wallace lies on the ground after being shot at a political rally in 1972.The Associated Press
While Mr. Wallace was widely reviled as a defender of segregation, his would-be assassin, Arthur Bremer, appears to have tried to kill him to become famous. Mr. Bremer had originally wanted to assassinate then-president Richard Nixon, but gave up the attempt when he could not find an opportunity to do it.
The country’s history of such violence has led to increasingly stepped-up security. Where it was once possible to approach the U.S. president in a theatre or a railway station – where Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Garfield, respectively, were assassinated – current events with presidents are highly guarded. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which starts Monday and is scheduled to renominate Mr. Trump for president, all attendees have had to go through Secret Service screenings.
Still, there are sometimes significant gaps. At the congressional baseball shooting in 2017, for instance, none of the participants save Mr. Scalise had a protective detail. Members of Congress at the time fretted that, had the security detail not been there, the shooter could have massacred several lawmakers.
“The field was basically a killing field,” Senator Rand Paul told CNN at the time. “Had the Capitol Hill police not been there, he could have walked around the field and just shot everybody.”
Softballs on the ground behind a police officer in Alexandria, Virginia on June 14, 2017 after a shooting involving Steve Scalise.The Associated Press
It is certain that investigators will want to understand how, even with the security afforded former presidents, someone was apparently able to open fire at Mr. Trump’s rally. While participants at such events have to pass through metal detectors, Mr. Trump often holds events in the open air – as he did Saturday – with sightlines outside the perimeter of the rally.
Presidential assassinations and assassination attempts also hold a significant place in the U.S.’s collective psyche. Despite official investigations concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former defector to the Soviet Union, was solely responsible for killing Mr. Kennedy, an avalanche of books, movies and internet conspiracy theories posit other possibilities.
A Stephen Sondheim musical about the people who have killed presidents or tried to, Assassins, gets regular productions, including an Off-Broadway revival in 2021.