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.