Assassination attempts are ruptures in the social fabric that can take decades to fully understand. But in the immediate aftermath, we can begin to see the way attempts like the one President Trump just survived can change a president’s fortunes.
Although differences between Saturday’s incident and past attempts are plentiful, the past can be instructive: Assassination attempts against sitting presidents have tended to compound their political problems and isolate them from the public. Rather than reviving a president’s flagging fortunes, negative assessments have tended to harden. This can apply equally to a president’s party.
That illogic suggests that once a president’s ratings have fallen (and Mr. Trump’s approval rating remains below 40 percent), recouping lost ground is tough to pull off. Since 1950, the United States has experienced six assassination attempts on sitting presidents in which a gun has been fired or aimed at a president, including one that killed a president, John F. Kennedy. (This list excludes attacks on candidates and former presidents, as well as dozens of other plots.) Presidents Harry Truman and Gerald Ford survived attempts on their lives. But their stoicism in the face of danger failed to reverse their parties’ already waning prospects.
The attack on Truman on Nov. 1, 1950, happened just days before midterm elections. Initially, pundits thought that it would help Democrats at the ballot box. But voters — angry about the Korean War, labor conflict and inflation — punished Truman’s party at the polls. His approval rating was 39 percent before the near miss; it fell to 33 percent by December, shortly after the attack. Truman remained unpopular throughout his presidency and declined to seek re-election.
The oft-forgotten two attempts on Ford’s life in September 1975 (both by women, both in California) failed to lift his popularity or reset his presidency because they appeared to undercut part of his agenda: The United States remained politically violent and stubbornly divided, despite Ford’s promise to heal national wounds caused by Watergate. The back-to-back incidents also solidified his emerging image as a bumbling commander in chief.
Several months before that benighted month, television cameras filmed Ford descending the stairs of an airplane and falling down. Reporters called him the “klutz in chief.” On Oct. 14, 1975, a 19-year-old man accidentally rammed a limousine the president was riding in, prompting reporters to question the competence of his administration. “The car wreck was emblematic of the chaos he was facing,” one writer later observed. In November, “Saturday Night Live” mocked Ford as a dimwitted, accident-prone rube. The perceived omnipotence of the chief executive seemed to preclude extending sympathy to him for surviving two near tragedies.
In the fall of 1975, Ford’s approval ratings largely remained in the mid-40s, where they had been just before the attempts on his life. Ronald Reagan almost defeated Ford in the 1976 Republican primary, and Ford, a onetime Michigan football star, lost the White House to Jimmy Carter in November.
John Hinckley Jr.’s shooting of Reagan outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington on March 30, 1981, was a partial exception to this pattern. Reagan almost died, but unlike John F. Kennedy, he lived. His unflagging bravura (“Honey, I forgot to duck,” he quipped to his wife, Nancy) provided a jolt of hope to a nation grappling with the aftereffects of the Vietnam War, stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis. Mr. Trump aims for a similar effect, immediately pivoting to his plans to resurrect the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and redoubling his call to build a White House ballroom to harden the president’s security.
One month after being shot, Reagan addressed a joint session of Congress. The president praised the Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy for taking a bullet for the president; after two decades of turmoil and decline, Reagan implied, America’s fortunes had turned, and now was the time to pass his sweeping tax cuts. Thousands of schoolchildren and adults sent get-well-soon cards, with many expressing thanks to God that Reagan hadn’t died. By May 1981, Reagan’s approval rating had soared to 68 percent.
But even Reagan’s personal popularity was insufficient to help his party in the 1982 midterm elections. Facing a recession, Reagan’s approval tumbled, and his party lost more than two dozen seats in the House. Still, Reagan’s message — America was back — would define his “morning in America” re-election victory. The Washington Post reporter David Broder reflected that Reagan’s recovery had made him into “a mythic figure” who had become “politically untouchable from that point on.”
Reagan’s near-death experience also awakened in him the dream of abolishing nuclear weapons. “Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war,” he said later. And he invoked the shooting to justify his endorsement of gun control legislation after he left the White House — a short-lived political turn for the Republican Party.
Mr. Trump has praised the Secret Service’s bravery and denounced the “pretty sick guy” who tried to kill him. But like most presidents who have faced a close call, Mr. Trump can’t count on an outpouring of public sympathy to save what remains of his presidency. Truman and Ford failed to overcome the structural challenges dragging them down, while it took an economic rebound two years after the attack to help vault Reagan to a second term.
Mr. Trump is waging an unpopular war in a time of rising costs and pain at the gas pump. He seems to be alienating more young voters and Latinos, two groups who helped elect him to a second term. Like Truman, he is a well-known figure who has stood at the center of national politics for many years. The latest attack may inspire parts of his base to turn out to support his party in the midterms, but whether it’s a midterm election or the rest of his presidency, history offers little hope that a near miss will reset his presidency.
When it comes to such acts of political violence, there are precious few Hollywood endings.
Matthew Dallek is a historian and a professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management. Robert Dallek is a presidential historian and the author of “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.” They are working on a book about failed presidential assassination attempts and political violence in the 20th century.
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