Blood and violence are the mainstays of American politics, past and present

Donald Trump who according to insiders, has always feared an assassin’s bullet would take his life. Picture: EPA/David Maxwell

In the wake of Donald Trump’s assassination attempt, his successor in the White House, Joe Biden, offered a speech which denounced political violence, declaring, “This is not who we are.”

To outside observers, the statement is patently wrong.

America bears a long and tragic history of political violence with four presidents murdered in office. The first Abraham Lincoln, the greatest politician of his day and arguably any other, shot in the head while he watched a play at the Ford Theatre.

One of the sadder stories of American political violence goes that Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, witnessed two further presidential assassinations at close quarters. Robert was at the White House on the evening his father was shot.

Robert Lincoln, who had been named Secretary of War in James Garfield’s administration, was in the waiting room at the Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station in Washington DC when President Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881, by a deranged breakaway Republican.

While doctors scrambled to save the President’s life, Robert Lincoln mused, “How many hours of sorrow I have passed in this town.”

Garfield died three months afterwards from sepsis and a ruptured spleen.

Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head while he watched a play at the Ford Theatre.

Twenty years on, Robert Lincoln was in Buffalo New York for the Pan-American Exposition when the 25th President William McKinley was shot twice by an anarchist. The first shot grazed the President’s coat button and did no damage. The second round entered his abdomen. At first it was thought McKinley would survive. His Vice-President, Teddy Roosevelt, hunting in the Adirondacks, was informed of the event but was assured McKinley would make a full recovery.

McKinley died eight days later after his abdominal wound became gangrenous.

Responding to a flurry of newspaper editorials demanding better security for leading public figures, the Secret Service which had acted as a federal law enforcement agency under the aegis of the Department of Treasury since 1865, assumed full-time responsibility for the protection of the President in 1902. Lincoln had used bodyguards for his protection during the Civil War but with that exception, every president from Washington to McKinley had no security detail or bodyguards.

Teddy Roosevelt would survive an assassination attempt as a former President on the hustings in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1912. Despite being shot in the chest, he urged the crowd to calm. The assassin had been set upon by the mob but Roosevelt brought the assaults to an end.

The most extraordinary President in American history then went onto deliver his speech before seeking medical treatment. Bleeding from his chest wound, Roosevelt’s speech began, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

Teddy was a ‘Bull Moose’ Republican, a progressive largely opposed to the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Garfield was killed by a fellow Republican, a member of what was then known as the Stalwart faction, and incensed that he had been overlooked for a political appointment. McKinley was killed by a Polish born anarchist. Roosevelt’s assailant was a mentally unbalanced man who claimed he had seen a vision of William McKinley pointing to Roosevelt and took this to mean that he had to kill the 26th POTUS.

JFK moments before his assassination in Dallas in 1963.

JFK had the back of his head shot off in Dallas in 1963. His brother Robert, then a candidate for the Democratic Primary in 1968, was fatally shot on June 5, 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Bobby’s death came just three months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.

On the eve of King’s assassination, the pastor and activist addressed the congregation at Mason Temple, the largest Black-American pentecostal church in the state and delivered perhaps his finest speech ending with a prediction of his death.

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Martin Luther King Jr was killed at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Michigan’s only President, Gerald Ford, a likeable though largely ineffectual politician thrust into the White House after Nixon’s resignation, survived two assassination attempts.

Ronald Reagan was wounded from a ricochet off the presidential limousine which punctured his lung and caused internal bleeding. His press secretary, James Brady was hit by gunfire and was seriously wounded as was a secret service agent and a police officer. The motive of the failed assassin, John Hinkley Jr was not overtly political. Hinkley, who was subsequently determined to be mentally unfit to stand trial over the attempted assassination, had sought to impress actress Jodie Foster with whom he had developed a pathological fascination.

President Obama faced an estimated 30 credible death threats a day for every day of his two-term presidency.

It’s often written that the US is more politically divided in recent times than any other in its history. It’s simply not true. The United States of America is a nation born in violence that denounces violence only in the wake of yet another violent episode.

So we come to Donald Trump who according to insiders, has always feared an assassin’s bullet would take his life. In the moment that we’ve all seen now – the sound of shots being fired, Trump reaching to grab at his right ear before being set upon by secret service agents and then rising triumphantly, fist pumping the air.

Thankfully, his wounds were minor. While some turned to conspiracy theories and convoluted suspicions of deep state hit squads, the rest of us understood how close the US had come to yet another cataclysm.

This event, like so many in the past, occurred in the mire of a fallacy that two essentially centrist political parties – one to the Left, the other to the Right — have combined to become a destructive force from which only chaos and mayhem can come. Like the notion that the US has never been more disparate, it is a falsehood. What is starkly true is that political violence is a mainstay of American politics and it has always been thus.