A Timeline of Assassination Attempts Against U.S. Presidents

Former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, where a gunman, later identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, opened fire on the presumptive GOP candidate. The shooting, which pierced Trump’s right ear, killed one rally attendee and critically injured two more bystanders, casts a huge shadow over this week’s Republican National Convention, where Trump is expected to accept his third consecutive nomination as the GOP’s presidential candidate heading into the 2024 election.

While there have been several failed attempts to harm or kill a U.S. president in the meantime, Saturday’s attack on Donald Trump was the most serious attempt on the life of a president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagon was shot and seriously injured in 1981. Three and a half years after the events of January 6, 2021, it once again drew the spotlight on the increasingly polarized political climate in the United States, which has raised concerns about possible eruptions of political violence in the run-up to and after the upcoming presidential election.

History is full of examples of violence against elected leaders and the United States is no exception. As our chart shows, four U.S. presidents have been assassinated while in office, with Ronald Reagan the only sitting president to survive an assassination attempt severely injured. Like Trump, former president Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning for a return to the White House, when he was shot and injured in an attack in 1912. Roosevelt survived with a bullet lodged in his chest muscle, after the bullet’s impact had been softened by folded paper and a glasses case in his pocket.