At 2:27 p.m. on March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr., obsessed with the young actress Jodie Foster and seeking her attention, emerged from a crowd gathered at the doors of the Hilton Hotel in Washington and fired six shots in less than two seconds at the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. He hit the politician, his press secretary, James Brady, who would be left in a wheelchair, and a Secret Service agent and a police officer. This Saturday night, 45 years and 25 days later, almost exactly at the same location, another man, Cole Tomas Allen, sped through a security checkpoint near the hotel lobby, armed with a shotgun, a pistol, and several knives, attempting to reach the ballroom where Donald Trump, the first lady, Vice President JD Vance, and the top U.S. government officials were located. Allen opened fire before being taken down and subdued, hitting another Secret Service member in his bulletproof vest, but he failed to carry out the massacre he was prepared for.
For four decades, Hinckley Jr.'s, a disturbed individual, had been the last real assassination attempt in the United States, a country sadly accustomed to political violence. His name holds a prominent place among assassins or aspirants, although not at the level of the two most famous: Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed John F. Kennedy, and John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Lincoln. Since July 2024, both share a category with Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing his ear and killing a spectator before being shot down.
The history of the USA is rife with political violence at the highest level. The first president to narrowly escape was Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. Four died in office: Lincoln in 1865; James A. Garfield just 16 years later in 1881, at the hands of Charles J. Guiteau, a deranged individual demanding a position in his administration. William McKinley in 1901, at the hands of the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. And JFK, whose death is still a subject of controversy, conspiracies, investigations, and publications.
Assassination attempt on President Reagan.GETTY
There are more high-level examples. Robert Kennedy, JFK's brother, was assassinated in 1968 during the presidential campaign in which he aspired to the White House. The same year that Martin Luther King also died. Huey Long, a populist and demagogue governor of Louisiana, was assassinated in 1935, as he began to emerge as a possible rival to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In addition to them, three more were shot: the aforementioned Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, and Donald Trump, who survived in Butler and was close to another assassination attempt months later when his security located a man stationed with a rifle on a golf course in Florida.
Political violence had very critical moments in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, gradually decreasing. However, the recent years have been particularly dangerous. Last September, conservative activist and influencerCharlie Kirk, a friend of the president and highly followed in the MAGA world, was assassinated on a university campus in Utah. His widow, Erika, was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last night and left the event in tears, escorted by authorities. The shooting at the University of Utah was the 46th on an educational campus last year, following the assassination of the Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman, and her husband. And the attempted execution of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife at their doorstep, all on the same night, June 14.
Shortly before, in April 2025, a man set fire to the residence of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a presidential hopeful, with him and his entire family inside. Days later, two young Jews working at the Israeli embassy in Washington were shot for political and antisemitic reasons as they left a party, and that same week there was an attack at a demonstration for Hamas hostages in Colorado.
Not long before, in December 2024, Luigi Mangione shot dead a pharmaceutical executive in a New York street, and a podcast by the NYT with progressive journalists that downplayed the seriousness of the incident has been very controversial for years. Also controversial for years has been Donald Trump's way of mocking former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful Democratic leaders in the last half-century, after a man broke into her home and smashed her husband's skull with a hammer.
Violence has reached all levels, including a plot to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In 2017, Republican Congressman Steve Scalise was nearly killed, who was also at the party yesterday and helped evacuate several colleagues while playing baseball with other party members in Virginia. Similar incidents happened to Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Gifford, wife of astronaut, senator, and also Democratic candidate Mark Kelly, who was shot in the head in 2011.
In May 2023, Sai Varshith Kandula, a 19-year-old from Missouri, was arrested and convicted for crashing a truck into the White House facade. He was not even close to the president, but stated that his intention was to kill him. A few weeks ago, another man was arrested after violently breaking into Trump's Mar-a-Lago complex in Florida, although the president was in Washington at the time.
Three years earlier, in 2020, the FBI thwarted a conspiracy by far-right and supremacist groups to kidnap and kill Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan and one of the prominent names within the Democratic Party as a presidential candidate in 2028. In the 1970s, there were over 450 cases, according to academics. Since 1980, it has decreased, despite the assassination attempt on Reagan. In the 90s, there were some peaks, especially the savage bombing attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people, the worst act of domestic terrorism in the country. Political violence began to rise again in 2016, according to consulted experts, and it seems that the peak of the wave has not yet been reached.
Political scientist Robert Pape, from the University of Chicago, has defined this era as "the era of violent populism" and denounced that "American politics are at historically high levels of violence, both on the right and the left, which have been escalating." He attributes it to a mix of the constant weakening of crucial democratic institutions and the antidemocratic tendencies of various groups. A path that, he claims, is only getting worse.