Major Presidential Assassination Attempts Compared

With the failed attempt at the on April 25, there have been seven major attempts to assassinate President Trump since 2016.

Let us examine US presidential assassination attempts and attempt to ascertain why President Trump has been the most-targeted president in US history.

The following covers confirmed, documented attempts from the Civil War era through the present. Motives are included where established. “Attempt” is defined broadly to include shots fired, credible armed plots, and confirmed murder-for-hire schemes.

Shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C., Booth, a Confederate sympathizer and actor, led a coordinated conspiracy targeting Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary Seward simultaneously.

Motive: Confederate loyalism, rage over the South’s defeat, and desire to destabilize Union government.

Charles J. Guiteau shot Garfield at a Washington train station. Garfield died of his wounds and complications from medical treatment two months later.

Motive: Delusional personal grievance—Guiteau had sought a diplomatic appointment he was denied; a “disappointed office-seeker.”

Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot McKinley twice at point-blank range at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. McKinley died eight days later.

Motive: Anarchist ideology; opposition to capitalism and government authority.

John Schrank shot Roosevelt in Milwaukee during a campaign speech. The bullet was slowed by a folded speech and eyeglass case. Roosevelt continued speaking for 90 minutes before seeking treatment.

Motive: Schrank claimed McKinley’s ghost instructed him to prevent Roosevelt from seeking a third term; likely delusional.

Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at FDR’s motorcade in Miami. FDR was unharmed; Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who was with FDR, died from his wounds.

Motive: Anarchist ideology; hatred of capitalists and those in power; possible mental instability.

Two Puerto Rican nationalists, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, stormed Blair House. One Secret Service officer and Torresola were killed. Truman was unharmed.

Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository during a motorcade through Dealey Plaza, Dallas. Kennedy died at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Motive: Disputed; Oswald was a Marxist with Soviet ties and Cuban sympathies; official finding was a lone gunman, though controversy remains.

Arthur Bremer twice tried to ambush Nixon (though ultimately shot Governor George Wallace instead). Samuel Byck attempted to hijack a plane in 1974 to crash it into the White House.

Motive: Bremer—personal desire for infamy; Byck—rage against Nixon over economic policies and Watergate.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Manson Family cult member) pointed a .45 at Ford in Sacramento; her gun did not fire. Sara Jane Moore fired a revolver at Ford in San Francisco; a bystander deflected her arm.

Fromme: Manson cult ideology, environmentalism; Moore: leftist radicalism, desire to “trigger a revolution.”

John Hinckley Jr. fired six shots at Reagan outside the Washington Hilton, wounding Reagan, Press Secretary James Brady, and two officers. Reagan underwent emergency surgery.

Motive: Obsession with actress Jodie Foster; attempted to impress her by replicating a scene from “Taxi Driver”; found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Francisco Duran fired 29 rounds from an assault rifle at the White House fence. Clinton was on the other side of the building. Three bystanders tackled Duran.

Motive: Anti-government militia ideology; paranoid delusions about a “mist” emerging from Clinton.

Vladimir Arutunian threw a live hand grenade at Bush during a speech in Tbilisi, Georgia. The grenade, wrapped in a cloth, did not detonate.

Motive: Anti-American, anti-Western ideology; Arutunian was a Georgian national.

Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez fired 25 rounds from an automatic rifle at the White House, striking a window. Separately, four militia members were arrested in 2012 for plotting to kill Obama.

Ortega-Hernandez: Believed Obama was the Antichrist; militia group: white supremacist ideology.

No president in US history has faced as many separate, credible, documented attempts across as wide a range of perpetrators—domestic lone actors, organized foreign state actors, and far-left political operatives—as Donald Trump.

Gregory Lee Leingang stole a forklift and drove it toward Trump’s presidential motorcade, intending to flip the limousine. He was arrested after the forklift became jammed. He confessed to the attempted murder and received 20 years.

Pakistani national Asif Raza Merchant, with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was arrested in Houston the day before the Butler shooting—charged with recruiting assassins to kill Trump. Convicted March 2026.

Motive: Iranian state revenge for Trump’s 2020 assassination of General Qasem Soleimani.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, opened fire at a campaign rally from a rooftop 150 yards away, firing eight rounds from an AR-15. A bullet grazed Trump’s right ear. Attendee Corey Comperatore was killed shielding his family; two others were critically wounded. Crooks was killed by USSS counter-snipers 12 seconds after opening fire.

Motive: FBI found no clear motive after investigating 17 social media accounts; Crooks had donated to a progressive voter turnout PAC in 2021, but was registered Republican.

Ryan Wesley Routh hid in the bushes at Trump International Golf Club with an AK-style rifle, 300-500 yards from Trump on the course. A Secret Service agent fired at Routh; he fled and was captured by Florida law enforcement. Found guilty on all counts Sept. 2025; sentenced to life in prison Feb. 2026. Planning had begun as early as Feb 2024 with an accomplice.

Motive: Far-left political ideology; had made 19 donations to ActBlue; authored a self-published book inviting Iran to assassinate Trump; pro-Ukraine zealotry; social media posts calling Trump “dangerous.”

The DOJ charged Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan citizen with IRGC ties who had previously been imprisoned in the U.S., with a second murder-for-hire plot. An IRGC official had urged Shakeri to “set aside other efforts” to focus on killing Trump. Two U.S. accomplices were convicted in January 2026; Shakeri remains at large.

Motive: Iranian state revenge for Soleimani assassination; geopolitical retaliation.

Austin Tucker Martin, 21, of North Carolina, crashed his vehicle into the security perimeter of Mar-a-Lago, armed with a shotgun and a gas canister. Secret Service agents shot and killed him. Trump was in Washington at the time.

Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, opened fire in the lobby of the Washington Hilton Hotel during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump and Cabinet members were present. Allen was arrested; charges were pending. It remained unclear at time of reporting whether Trump was the primary target.

On the historical record: Four presidents have been assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy); three wounded and survived (T. Roosevelt, Reagan, Trump); and dozens of serious attempts have been foiled. Gerald Ford’s two attempts in 17 days in 1975 was the previous high-water mark for attempts against a single president in a short period.

On Trump’s uniqueness: No president in American history has faced the combination Trump has: domestic politically motivated lone actors, two confirmed foreign state (Iranian IRGC) murder-for-hire plots, and ongoing security breaches across multiple years and locations. concluded bluntly as recently as April 26, 2026: “No modern president has faced this many threats.”

On rhetoric: The documented record shows a sustained pattern of language from Democratic officials, the Lincoln Project, and entertainment figures that went beyond political criticism into existential, eliminationist framing. As noted, since Trump’s 2016 election, Democrats, including Biden, Clinton, and other major figures, have made a regular habit of calling the leader of the opposition a “threat to our democracy.” against drawing a direct mechanical link between campaign rhetoric and individual acts of violence, while also acknowledging that close to a decade of near-constant verbal and social media attacks had created a charged environment.

On Secret Service reform: As of mid-2025, the USSS had recommended after Butler, with Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul concluding that “bureaucratic incompetence nearly cost President Trump his life.”

The report intentionally tries to be fair—noting documented facts from multiple sides—while taking seriously the legitimate concern that demonizing rhetoric creates conditions in which violent actors feel justified.

This question has multiple overlapping answers, ranging from the structural to the rhetorical.

For nearly a decade, prominent Democrat officeholders, media figures, and celebrities deployed language about Trump that went well beyond standard political criticism—characterizing him not merely as a bad president but as an existential, Nazi-like, democracy-destroying threat who “must be stopped” or “eliminated.” Some of the documented rhetoric:

— President Joe Biden, in a private donor call leaked July 2024—five days before the Butler shooting. Biden later acknowledged the remark to NBC.

“He has to be eliminated.” (Said of Trump in a televised interview, in the context of his being “destructive to our democracy.”)

— Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY), November 2023. Goldman condemned political violence after both assassination attempts, but the quote circulated widely.

“Trump is a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms.” / “It’s on us to recognize the threat he poses.”

— Vice President Kamala Harris, repeated throughout 2023–2024. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise noted that the second would-be assassin, Routh, “was regurgitating the same language as Kamala.”

“When was the last time an actor assassinated a president? Maybe it’s time.”

— Actor Johnny Depp, at the Glastonbury Festival, June 2017. He later apologized.

— Madonna, Women’s March, January 2017. She later claimed her words were taken out of context.

“They’re still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump.”

— Rick Wilson, cofounder of the Lincoln Project NeverTrump group, on MSNBC, 2015.

Rep. Maxine Waters encouraged supporters to confront and “push back” on Trump administration members in public. House delegate Stacey Plaskett told MSNBC that Trump “needs to be shot.”

The documented link between rhetoric and action: Ryan Wesley Routh had and had extensively posted anti-Trump material online, echoing Democrat messaging, before his armed appearance at Trump’s golf club. , “Kamala needs to stop saying that President Trump is a threat to democracy. There are unhinged people that are taking that as a call to go and try to eliminate President Trump.”

Throughout American history, political opponents have called each other names, accused each other of bad policies, and engaged in fierce rhetoric. What is different in the Trump era is the systematic framing of one individual as an existential, civilizational threat—not just a political opponent with bad ideas, but a Hitler-like figure whose continuation in public life represented an emergency requiring action. When leaders repeatedly tell their followers that an opponent is literally destroying democracy and must be stopped, a small percentage of those followers may interpret that as license for violence. Political violence experts note this phenomenon without excusing the actors themselves.

The two documented IRGC-directed murder-for-hire plots against President Trump (the Merchant plot and the Shakeri plot) represent something entirely outside the historical norm: a foreign government actively recruiting assassins on American soil to kill a major presidential candidate and then a sitting president. This reflects Trump’s unique position as the architect of the Soleimani assassination in 2020—Iran has explicitly stated that killing Trump would constitute “.” No other modern American president has faced this level of documented, ongoing foreign state assassination targeting.

Prior to the digital age, violent rhetoric circulated more slowly and among smaller audiences. Today, a single post calling for President Trump to be “eliminated” can reach millions in hours, is algorithmically amplified by engagement metrics, and can be screenshotted and reshared indefinitely. The ecosystem of Twitter/X, Facebook, TikTok, and fringe platforms has created an environment in which the most extreme anti-Trump content—including explicit fantasies about his assassination—circulates constantly, potentially normalizing violence in susceptible individuals.

Independent investigations found that prior to July 2024, the Secret Service ; suffered from a culture of “doing more with less”; had communications failures at the Butler rally, including agents using a “chaotic mixture of radio, cell phone, text, and email”; and failed to understand the unique and elevated threat level facing President Trump. The independent panel said flatly, “Another Butler can and will happen again” without major reforms. These structural gaps created windows of vulnerability that a more capable protective detail might have closed.

President Trump’s political brand has always centered on massive, open-air rallies with enormous crowds—a format that is inherently difficult to secure. Unlike more cautious presidents who prefer controlled, ticketed events in indoor venues, Trump regularly appeared at venues with exposed sightlines, adjacent buildings, and thousands of attendees. This combination of political choice and the magnitude of his public presence created more opportunities for determined attackers than a president who rarely appears in such settings.

President Trump is arguably the most politically polarizing figure in American history since the Civil War era. The intensity of both his support and opposition—combined with genuine policy disputes over immigration, election integrity, the courts, and executive power—has created a political climate in which a small subset of those who hate him most intensely have been pushed toward violence. Historical analogs exist (Lincoln was similarly polarizing), but the sheer volume and visibility of anti-Trump sentiment is without modern parallel.

The marked increase in assassination attempts by left-wing actors over the past 10 years directly parallels the rise in violent rhetoric—particularly against President Trump—from elected Democrats and their media allies. The most impactful single change would be for prominent Democrat politicians to assume some rhetorical responsibility and consciously step back from existential, civilizational framing of their opponents.

Calling someone a bad president, even a terrible one, is fundamentally different from calling them a Hitler-like threat to democracy who “must be eliminated.” A bipartisan compact on language—particularly from the most senior officials—would directly address the rhetoric-to-violence pipeline without requiring any legal coercion or free speech limitations. Republicans would almost certainly sign onto such an agreement. It would take a miracle for Democrats to do so.

Unprecedented demonization rhetoric from political opponents

I would add Comey's "8647" to this.

BTW -- on a recent cooking channel on YouTube, a chef -- who is never "edgy", "cultural" or "political" (he just cooks stuff, pure and simple) -- he was chopping vegetables and naturally ended up with end pieces that were not going to be added to the dish. So he scooped up the useless bits and threw them in the trash saying "Let's 86 these".

I interpreted that as a subtle way of saying: "I know what 86 means. You know what 86 means. Everyone knows what 86 means." I thought it was great. I think Comey is very disingenuous when he claims that 86 is an innocent number.

Simply put, the left wants Trump dead. They also want any of us who disagree with them, who resist their insane tyranny, dead.

Libs will say they don’t mean to inspire acts of violence; that they are simply musing about the possibility. I don’t want us to be a society where one is rounded up and put behind bars just on words alone but the culture has changed in the last 20 years where endorsing assassination now meets with approval in some circles rather than immediate disgust.

There needs to be some way of truly discouraging this sort of plots aginst the president. The only way I can think of is some cruel & unusual punishment for his assailants, but I don’t really like this approach either.

Srednik recalls Howard Dean, then chairman of the DNC, after his party was spanked in the 2004(?) presidential election ramping up the rhetoric and saying the party needed “a new, more shrill voice.” Srednik correlated Dean’s “declaration of shrill” with a media report that Sorros (who made his fortune through “beggaring currencies” just as Lenin taught) threatening to withhold his sponsorship to reasonable candidates.

Could this be the reason for the violent rhetoric? Oh, Srednik also believes the “Evil Emperor” has blackmail power over his orcs.

One can almost feel sorry for our anarchist-minded pols on the wrong side of history. You see, once a person goes down the hate path it rots the soul.

Google “Baltimore plot” for info on one plan to murder Abraham Lincoln. There was also a fellow surnamed Conrad who claimed he and a fellow alum had planned to kidnap Lincoln.
Lincoln had pretty good security for the times.

When leaders repeatedly tell their followers that an opponent is literally destroying democracy and must be stopped.

Wonder what the count of democrats in the news yelling that tune is?.

And it ain’t about just presidents.

The first assignation attempt was on Andrew Jackson.

On January 30, 1835, Andrew Jackson, the 7th president of the United States, survived an assassination attempt outside of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. while returning to the White House from a funeral. Richard Lawrence, a British-American unemployed house painter, approached Jackson and attempted to shoot him, but both of Lawrence’s pistols misfired. Jackson charged Lawrence and beat him with his walking cane before Lawrence was taken into custody. This is the first known attempted assassination of a U.S. president.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Major Presidential Assassination Attempts Compared

President Trump is in a league of his own.