Gunfire shattered the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at 8:36 p.m. on Saturday. The Secret Service immediately evacuated U.S. President Donald Trump. Alongside images of the chaos that briefly overtook the ballroom of the Washington Hilton — the hotel that each year hosts this gathering of power, press, and celebrities — came the resurfacing of the darkest ghosts of America’s political violence, a country where four presidents have been assassinated while in office. It was also the third attack Trump has survived, another sign of the increasingly tense atmosphere in the United States.

When he was still a candidate, Trump was lightly wounded in a shooting at a rally in the small town of Butler, Pennsylvania — an event that entered U.S. history that July day in 2024. The attacker and one attendee were killed. Two more people were left in critical condition. Just minutes after the then‑presidential hopeful stepped onto a platform to address thousands of supporters, a man opened fire eight times from the roof of a nearby building. One round grazed Trump’s ear. He left the stage bleeding, fist raised.

It was not the last against Trump before he returned to the White House for his second term. Two months after the attack, there was an incident at Trump’s golf club in Florida, which authorities investigated as an attempted assassination and which Republicans blamed on Democrats as a campaign tactic amid the technical heat with Kamala Harris, who had replaced Joe Biden as the nominee.

From the 1865 killing of president Abraham Lincoln by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth in a Washington theater to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, for which Lee Harvey Oswald was charged, the story of U.S. democracy can also be told through the assassinations that shook its foundations. In addition to Lincoln and Kennedy, two other presidents were shot to death: James A. Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley 20 years later.

The list of presidents or former presidents who survived assassination attempts includes Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. A man named John Schrank — who claimed he was acting under the guidance of former president William McKinley’s spirit — shot Roosevelt on October 14, 1912, when he had ended his term as president. Roosevelt was arriving at a campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Reagan, for his part, survived the shots fired by a disturbed man named John Hinckley Jr. It was in Washington, D.C., at the entrance to the Hilton, an imposing hotel with a double-arched facade; there, a plaque commemorates that at 2:27 p.m. on March 30, 1981, precisely “on the 100th visit of a U.S. president” to the site, Hinckley, Jr., who was trying to impress actress Jodie Foster, shot Reagan with a .22 caliber revolver loaded with expanding bullets.

The swift response of the Secret Service, who rushed Reagan to George Washington University Hospital, saved the life of the newly inaugurated president. Surviving the attack also dramatically boosted his popularity and, according to his biographers, helped secure his second term.

That day, the bullets also struck White House press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and local police officer Thomas Delahanty. All three survived, but Brady suffered the worst injuries: left permanently disabled, he died in 2014, and the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide attributable to the shooting — though federal authorities chose not to bring additional charges against Hinckley.

For historians, the attempt on Reagan’s life marked the end of one of the most turbulent periods in modern U.S. political history, punctuated by assassinations that left a deep national scar, including those of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968. Four years later came the attack on presidential candidate George Wallace at a public event near Washington. And just three months before Reagan, a deranged man killed singer John Lennon, while another would come close to killing Pope John Paul II two months later.

Armed militias

The climate of political tension in the United States helped fuel the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, as well as the rise of armed far‑right militias.

In 2017, a small‑business owner from Illinois obsessed with Donald Trump opened fire on a group of Republican members of Congress who were practicing baseball about 20 minutes from the Capitol. He wounded five people, including the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Steve Scalise.

In 2022, a man was arrested near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with plans to kill him, while another murdered a judge in Wisconsin and had a list of future victims that included the Democratic governors of Wisconsin and Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, as well as the Republican leader of the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell.

Whitmer had also been targeted by an extremist militia plot that in 2020 planned to kidnap her and execute her over the measures she imposed during the pandemic lockdown.

Shortly before the 2022 midterm elections, a man attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the then‑speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer in their San Francisco home. She was the intended target. In court, the attacker claimed he wanted to “end corruption.” He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Another episode in this recurring wave of political violence came last September, when a 22‑year‑old man named Tyler Robinson killed MAGA leader Charlie Kirk as he spoke before roughly 3,000 people at a Utah university. Kirk was struck in the neck by a bullet fired from about 150 meters away and died instantly.

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