WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM AMERICAN HISTORY AND THE FOUR PRESIDENTS SHOT DEAD?
Sixteen years [after Lincoln’s assassination], in 1881, James Garfield was shot at a Washington railroad station and died two months later. And in 1901, William McKinley also died from bullet wounds after he was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
However, it was the experience of the man who succeeded McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, that is the example perhaps closest to the attack on Trump. In 1912, “Teddy” was running for a non-consecutive second term as president when he was shot before he was to deliver a speech to a crowd in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The bullet passed through his steel spectacle case and a folded copy of his speech before lodging in his chest.
Roosevelt was a big game hunter and one-time volunteer soldier, so had some experience of the impact of gun shots. He made the judgement that because he was not coughing blood, he was probably not fatally hurt, and went on to give the speech, blood gradually soaking through his shirt as he did so.
Roosevelt’s response, that it “takes more than that to kill a bull moose” consolidated his reputation for bravado, and forever endeared him to his most enthusiastic supporters. In what is perhaps a lesson for Trump, who may like to model himself on Roosevelt in his reaction to the attack, it was not enough to win him re-election.
And as Joseph Campbell noted in 2011 after the attack on Gabrielle Giffords: Blaming assassination on overheated commentary: No new tactic.
The extreme attempts to politicize the weekend shootings in Arizona were dismaying and wrong-headed, but not without parallel.
Efforts to link the attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to overheated political rhetoric and, more explicitly, to Republican Sarah Palin and the conservative Tea Party movement were evocative of a campaign more than a century ago to blame the assassination of President William McKinley on the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst.
McKinley was fatally shot in September 1901 by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, who, according to Hearst’s finest biographer, was unable to read English.
Even so, Hearst’s foes–notably, the New York Sun–sought to tie the assassination to ill-advised comments about McKinley that had appeared in Hearst’s newspapers months earlier.
Plus ça change.
UPDATE: Byron York on “Rhetoric and the Trump assassination attempt:”
Last December the conservative writer and commentator Mollie Hemingway wrote that “This extreme and dangerous genre — of claiming Trump is Hitler — should probably be given the name ‘Assassination Prep.’”
Back in 2011, during the Obama years, an insane gunman shot Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords at an event in Arizona. Much media commentary in places like the New York Times, Washington Post, and the cable networks focused on an ad that former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had released featuring a map of the United States with small crosshairs scattered around the country where there were tight congressional races. Giffords’ district was one of them, although Palin did not name any of the candidates.
After the shooting, there were many calls for Republicans and conservatives to denounce the “rhetoric of violence” that commentators said Palin’s words represented. “Swearing off the rhetoric of violence: Will any prominent conservatives denounce ‘reload’ and ‘crosshairs’ imagery?” asked the left-wing journalist Joan Walsh. Her sentiments were echoed by many Democrats.
Now, there has been a great amount of what could be called the rhetoric of violence directed at Trump. After all, it appears that the multiple Democratic prosecutions and lawsuits directed at Trump, while damaging, will not keep him from running for president. In addition, after the debate, Biden’s much-discussed age-related infirmities have contributed to a continuing Trump lead in national polls. Democrats have thrown about everything they can at the former president, and so far, it has not worked. Frustration is high among Democrats.
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