Reagan Changed After 1981 Attempted Assassination But Trump Will Be The Same, Old Trump
President Ronald Reagan was profoundly affected by his attempted assassination but it was clear from the moment that his bloody ear popped up on the for-profit golden sneakers that nothing had changed for trump since he was shot last week.
Rather than being saved from the grim reaper through an act from on high, the fourth attempt on trump’s life was aborted by the incompetence of his alleged shooter, much like the Sept. 2017 attempt was botched when a would-be assassin planned to drive a forklift over the presidential vehicle but the forklift got stuck before reaching the president’s motorcade. Likewise, in 2018 and again in 2020, two misinformed would-be assassins mailed letters containing the biotoxin ricin to the White House, believing they would be opened by the president himself.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa., climbed onto a roof in Butler, Pa., on July 13 while a crowd gathered to hear trump. Crooks allegedly fired eight shots from his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, killing one person, and wounding two others in addition to sending one round through trump’s ear. Crooks, himself, was killed by Secret Service sharpshooters.
Crooks is the latest notorious footnote to history of would-be presidential assassins that includes Cypriano Ferrandini, John Flammang Schrank, Severino Di Giovanni, Giuseppe Zangara, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, Samuel Byck, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Sarah Jane Moore, Raymond Lee Harvey, John Hinckley Jr., Frank Eugene Corder, Vladimir Arutyunian, Oscar Ortega-Hernandez, James Dutschke, Arthur Bremer, Leon F. Czolgosz, Richard Lawrence, Shannon Richardson, William Clyde Allen, III, Pascale Ferrier and Gregory Lee Leingang.
Trump was shot and wounded in his right ear while addressing a campaign rally near Butler, Pa. Video of the incident showed trump clasping his right ear before taking cover on the floor of the podium, where he was shielded by Secret Service agents. After agents helped him to his feet, trump emerged with blood on his ear and face as he shouted, as if it was rehearsed, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Trump was escorted off-stage and taken to a nearby hospital before being released in stable condition a few hours later. A day later he made his first public appearance after the shooting at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wis.
In contrast, events unfolded quickly on March 30, 1981. President Reagan had spoken to an unfriendly gathering of the AFL-CIO at the Washington Hilton and was walking toward his waiting car. Among the crowd of nearby photographers and journalists was John David Hinckley Jr., a 26-year-old Oklahoma drifter who had become obsessed with the actress Jodi Foster after seeing her play a teen prostitute in the movie “Taxi Driver” and hoped to impress her by shooting Reagan. A year earlier, Hinckley attempted to trail President Jimmy Carter, but was arrested for carrying his guns near a Carter campaign stop.
As Reagan and Secret Service members approached, Hinckley leaped out and fired six shots from a handgun. Reagan did not realize he had been hit. He felt a sharp pain but thought it was a rib broken while he was shoved into the limo. The car sped off and arrived at George Washington University Hospital where Reagan insisted on walking into the emergency room but fainted from loss of blood before he got inside.
In addition to seriously wounding the president, Hinkley gravely wounded James Brady, Reagan’s press secretary; a police officer; and a member of the Secret Service, who all survived their wounds. Hinkley was seized and the courts later determined that he was insane and sentenced him to a psychiatric hospital where he remained until his release in 2016.
At the emergency room, Reagan was treated and he began to breathe more easily. Looking up at the medical team gathered around him, he quipped, “I hope they are all Republicans.” The chief surgeon answered, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.” A bullet that had punctured a lung and lodged perilously close to Reagan’s heart was removed and Reagan subsequently recovered. He was discharged from the hospital 11 days later.
Reagan’s survival generated enormous nationwide sympathy and boosted his popularity early in his first term. The shooting also led First Lady Nancy Reagan to consult a mystic whose predictions would affect every decision Regan made over the next seven years. The assassination attempt intensified Reagan’s sense of destiny and the result was his historic summit talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the start of the most important steps ever taken to rid the world of the threat of nuclear war.
After trump was shot, words of support and compassion came from world leaders and U.S. lawmakers from both parties. Even Reagan’s attempted assassin, Hinckley, chimed in with a note that “violence is not the way to go.”
As far as trump, a statement released after the shooting by his son, Donald Trump Jr., did not bode well for a shift by his father to words of national peace and unity.
“I just spoke to my father on the phone, and he is in great spirits. He will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him,” Trump, Jr. said.
Trump had a chance to see the attempt on his life as a profoundly life-changing and nation-changing event. He attended the convention with a bandaged ear while in a bizarre sight, several attendees wore fake ear bandages.
Trump spoke for 1 hour and 32 minutes, the longest acceptance speech in modern American history. He started with somber, sober words of unity and references to God as he recounted the shooting. But quickly he reverted back to his familiar rambling, sometimes incoherent series of gaslighting and attacks. Before long, the words of unity were replaced by long winded attacks about “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and “this horrible, horrible administration that we have right now.” It was clear that nothing had changed for trump.
Not surprisingly, trump’s popularity got a big boost after the shooting as did the value of stocks linked to Trump’s media and technology interests. Trump Media & Technology Group shares soared 31 percent, raising its stock market value to $7.7 billion, and major cryptocurrency-related stocks, including Coinbase and bitcoin miners Riot Platforms and Marathon Digital, had increases of 11 percent to 18 percent. Video-sharing platform Rumble, known for its far right popularity, saw its stock price jump 21 percent.
Trump has been lucky in escaping several attacks and planned attacks with nothing more than a bloody ear.
Gregory Lee Leingang, 42, of Bismark, N.D., pleaded guilty in 2017 to a bizarre plot to kill trump. Leingang stole a forklift and entered a presidential motorcade route on Sept. 6, 2017, before trump arrived to give a tax reform speech at a Mandan refinery. Authorities said Leingang planned to drive to the limo, flip it with the forklift and kill trump. Leingang was caught after the forklift got stuck in a gated area of the refinery. Authorities said that Leingang had been suffering from a “serious psychiatric crisis during this incident.”
In the fall of 2018, William Clyde Allen III of Logan, Utah, a navy veteran, attempted to kill trump by mailing him letters containing ground caster seeds, which contain the deadly biotoxin ricin. Another would-be assassin, Canadian Pascale Ferrier, similarly mailed a ricin-loaded letter to trump in 2020. Both times, trump was saved when the envelopes were intercepted by authorities before trump could touch them.
Allen had a tawdry history before the shooting. In 2004, two years after he left the Navy, Allen was charged with a child sex-abuse case with two girls. He pleaded guilty to neglect and abuse charges and was not registered as a sex offender. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail and was released in 2011.
Four sitting presidents have been killed by assassins: Abraham Lincoln (1865, by John Wilkes Booth), James A. Garfield (1881, by Charles J. Guiteau), William McKinley (1901, by Leon Czolgosz), and John F. Kennedy (1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald).
Reagan is the only president to have been injured in an assassination attempt while in office and survive. Two former presidents, Theodore Roosevelt (1912, by John Schrank) and trump (2024) also were injured in attacks.
The first attempt on a president’s life came in 1835, when a homeless house painter, Richard Lawrence, pointed his gun and fired at President Andrew Jackson at a congressional funeral. The gun misfired, saving Jackson’s life.
In 1860, President-elect Lincoln boarded a train to Washington, unaware that a Baltimore man, Cypriano Ferrandini, was planning to murder him. Police uncovered the plot and warned the Lincoln family. Ferrandini was a was a barber from Corsica who emigrated to the United States. He was caught in a secessionist dragnet in 1862, but was never prosecuted for his pro-Southern convictions and membership in the Knights of the Golden Circle.
President William Taft was the first president to meet with a Mexican president. He celebrated the 1909 meeting with a parade of 2,000 U.S. soldiers and more than 2,000 Mexican troops. At one point, a man wielding a pencil pistol broke through the crowd and tried to murder both presidents at once. He got within a few feet of his targets before he was subdued.
In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was campaigning for a third term in office at a rally in Milwaukee, Wis. A barkeep named John Schrank shot a bullet at Roosevelt but the bullet went into the bundled papers of Roosevelt’s speech, which he’d stuffed in his breast pocket earlier, as well as his glasses case. The bullet’s impact was slowed but it still lodged in Roosevelt’s chest.
Undaunted, Roosevelt continued giving his speech, and ripped the bloodied papers out of his pocket, telling the crowd, “You see, it takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose.” After the speech, Roosevelt was hospitalized and recovered, while Schrank spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital. Schrank, a German American, had hallucinations and claimed that the ghost of assassinated President William McKinley told him that Roosevelt was his murderer, and the ghost asked Schrank to avenge his death. Schrank had followed Roosevelt for 24 days before getting his chance at ignominy.
Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928 and had started a goodwill tour of Latin America. He did not know that he was the planned victim of a gang led by anarchist, Severino Di Giovanni, who believed the visit was the time to get revenge on the United States. Di Giovanni arranged to have explosives planted on the railroad tracks in Argentina but the plot was uncovered and the bombers all were arrested and Hoover was safe.
Severino became the best-known anarchist figure in Argentina in a campaign of violence in support of antifascism and Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, who were executed for a highly controversial murder.
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was campaigning before a crowd of 25,000 people in Miami, Fla., when he escaped an assassination attempt by Giuseppe Zangara, 33, an unemployed man who’d just purchased an $8 pistol. Zangara later said he was not opposed to FDR specifically, but hated “all officials and anyone who is rich.” Zangara fired six shots, missing FDR but hitting five other people, including visiting Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who died from his wounds. The crowd quickly subdued Zangara.
President Harry S. Truman first escaped harm in 1947 when a violent, Zionist group called the Stern Gang sent multiple letter bombs to the president, rigged to explode when the envelopes were opened. The White House mail room snagged the letters and the bombs were defused by the Secret Service, with no injuries.
In 1950, Truman was staying at the Blair House in Washington, D.C., while the White House was being renovated. Two would-be assassins, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, went to the front door and started shooting. Both men who were Puerto Rican nationalists were quickly caught. Torresola was mortally wounded and Collazo was sentenced to death. In 1952, Truman arranged to have Collazo’s sentence changed to life imprisonment.
In 1974, Samuel Byck, 44, an Army veteran and former tire salesman, planned to hijack a commercial jetliner and crash it into the White House to kill President Richard Nixon. Byck, who was divorced and in financial trouble, had previously protested outside the White House wearing a Santa Claus costume. He had claimed that Nixon was the cause of poverty. Byck’s fateful plan ended quickly when he boarded a Delta airlines plane at Baltimore-Washington Airport but before the plane could take off, he was shot by police and then killed himself.
President Gerald Ford was the target of two unsuccessful assassination attempts. In 1975, Ford was in Sacramento, Calif., where Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, 27, a Charles Manson follower, planned to shoot Ford to end what she perceived as an environmental threat to the California redwoods. Fromme saw Ford and raised the gun but did not shoot. The Secret Service rapidly restrained her and Fromme was sentenced to life in prison.
Several weeks later, Ford was in San Francisco, Calif., when he fell in the sights of a former FBI informant, Sarah Jane Moore, 45. Moore raised her gun but she was neutralized when a nearby Vietnam veteran, Oliver Sipple, saw her and managed to throw off her aim. Secret Service agents hurried Ford into a vehicle for safety. Moore said in a 2009 interview that she planned to kill Ford and spark a violent revolution to bring change to America.
Jimmy Carter was speaking in Los Angeles to a group that included an unemployed drifter with the auspicious and ironic name of Raymond Lee Harvey. Harvey had a gun, later found to contain blank rounds, but he seemed suspicious and before he got off a shot, Secret Service agents caught and arrested him. The plan was for Harvey to cause a distraction with the blank shots while his partner, Osvaldo, would kill the president with a sniper rifle.
George H.W. Bush finished his presidency without an assassination attempt. But in April 1933, he had left the White House and was visiting Kuwait. Authorities later arrested 17 suspects on charges of attempting to assassinate the former president with a car bomb. Further investigation by the FBI showed the suspects were part of a covert operation directed by the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
During his time in office, President Bill Clinton survived two assassination attempts. The first was in September 1994, when an alcoholic truck driver, Frank Eugene Corder, 38, tried to pilot a small, stolen plane right into Clinton’s White House bedroom. The plane missed the mark but crashed into one of Andrew Jackson’s old magnolia trees.
In 1996, Clinton was visiting Manila, where Osama bin Laden had ordered his operatives to plant a bomb beneath a bridge to destroy the presidential motorcade. Secret Service agents found out about the plot and rerouted Clinton’s path.
Another attempt on Clinton’s life came in 1994, when Francisco Martin Duran, 26, an Army veteran who had been dishonorably discharged, fired 29 rounds from an SKS rifle at the White House. Duran was later convicted of attempting to assassinate Clinton and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
In May 2005, President George W. Bush stood beside Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on a stage in Freedom Square, in the city of Tbilisi, Georgia. Bush was giving a speech when a grenade came flying toward him from the audience. The grenade was live but did not detonate because the attacker had wrapped it up so tightly in a red handkerchief that the firing pin wasn’t able to deploy properly. The attacker, a Tblisi man, Vladimir Arutyunian, 27, escaped but was tracked down a few months later. After a bizarre trial, including one day where Arutyunian showed up with his mouth literally sewn shut, the would-be assassin was convicted and given life imprisonment for the presidential attack and for his murder of a police officer who had tried to arrest him.
Barack Obama received more death threats and assassination attempts than other U.S. presidents. The first one was in 2009, when Obama was at the Alliance of Civilizations Summit in Istanbul. A Syrian man was arrested for carrying fake press credentials, and the man later confessed that he’d been planning to stab Obama with a knife.
In 2011, Oscar Ortega-Hernandez, 21, fired multiple shots at the White House with an assault rifle. Ortega-Hernandez described himself as “the modern-day Jesus Christ” and believed it was his holy mission to kill Obama, whom he deemed “the Anti-Christ.” Ortega-Hernandez was arrested and charged with attempting to assassinate the president. Neither Obama nor First Lady Michelle Obama were home at the time but the couple’s youngest daughter, Sasha, and the first lady’s mother, Marian Shields Robinson, were in the White House. No one was injured. In March 2014, Ortega-Hernandez was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In 2013, typewritten letters were sent to Obama containing a suspicious substance later determined to be the deadly poison, ricin. An Elvis impersonator named Paul Kevin Curtis, 45, was initially charged but was later found innocent. Curtis’ online rival, James Dutschke, was instead charged and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Curtis, who suffered from bipolar disorder, had claimed that Dutschke had tried to frame him.
In May 2013, letters with traces of ricin were sent to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Mark Glaze, who was then the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns in Washington, D.C.; and to Obama.
Shannon Richardson of Texas was charged and was sentenced to 18 years in prison for sending letters with a note, “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. The right to bear arms is my constitutional God-given right. What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.” Richardson had minor roles on shows like “The Walking Dead” and “The Vampire Diaries” and originally blamed her husband for sending the poison and letters.