It’s largely forgotten now, but in June 2016, at one of the many febrile rallies Donald Trump held in the lead up to his election as US president, a Briton in his late teens tried to grab a police officer’s gun with the intention of killing the Republican nominee.
So when President Joe Biden responded to the attempted assassination of Trump this past weekend by saying “the idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of”, it’s about as accurate as his assessment of who the Ukrainian president is.
To start with the obvious — Trump is one of 15 current or former presidents, president-elects or presidential candidates to have an attempt made on their life. Four presidents have been murdered in office. From its foundations, the US has been riven with political violence. Here are some notable entries that stand out in a long, long list.
David Ramsay
If we ignore Alexander Hamilton’s duel in 1804, or the many Indigenous leadership figures murdered in the massacres of Indigenous Americans from the 1600s onwards, Ramsay, a doctor and one of the United States’ first historians, holds the unfortunate distinction of likely being the first politician to be assassinated in US history.
Ramsay was president of the South Carolina Senate by the time he was murdered by William Linnen, a tailor known for serial litigation and nuisance suits and having attempted to murder his lawyer. On May 6, 1815 Linnen shot Ramsay as he passed him on the street. In the aftermath, Ramsay — who had previously examined Linnen and declared him “deranged” — was quoted as saying:
I know not if these wounds be mortal; I am not afraid to die; but should that be my fate, I call on all here present to bear witness, that I consider the unfortunate perpetrator of this deed a lunatic, and free from guilt.
He died two days later.
Anton Cermak
Then mayor of Chicago Anton Cermak may be notably unlucky, which is saying something as a member of this list. He was next to then president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1933 during an impromptu speech when Giuseppe Zangara fired at the stage — bystander Lillian Cross hit Zangara with her purse, spoiling his shot so that it hit Cermak, not FDR. Cermak died 19 days later, and Zanagara was executed.
Theories spread that rather than a failed assassination attempt on Roosevelt, it had been a successful hit on Cermak on behalf of organised crime figures who were threatened by Cermak’s promise to crack down on lawlessness, but these have largely been dismissed since.
Gabby Giffords
On January 8, 2011, then Democratic representative Gabby Giffords was outside a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona when Jared Loughner shot her in the head. Loughner shot 19 people and killed six before he was subdued while attempting to reload. Among the dead were Gifford’s aide Gabe Zimmerman, Republican-appointed Federal Court judge John Roll, and Christina-Taylor Green, who was featured in the book Faces of Hope, which collected images of children born on the day on the September 11 attacks. She was nine.
Giffords, after being placed in an induced coma and following months of recovery, remarkably survived.
Clementa C. Pickney
Unlike say, congressman Leo Ryan — also killed as part of a wider massacre — the setting of Pickney’s death deepens rather than dilutes its political nature. A Democratic member of the South Carolina Senate, he represented the 45th District from 2000 until the evening of June 17, 2015, when a 21-year-old white supremacist called Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and, after an hour of Bible study led by Pickney (whom Roofe had asked for by name), opened fire, killing Pickney and nine others.
Weeks earlier, Pickney had given a speech about race and violence in the South Carolina Senate, after footage had emerged of the murder of an unarmed black man called Walter Scott at the hands of police. “Today the nation looks at South Carolina and is looking at us to see if we will rise to be the body and to be the state that we really say that we are,” Pickney said, citing “a real heartache and a yearning for justice, for people not just in the African American community, but for all people — and not just in the Charleston area or even in South Carolina, but across our country.”
