13 American presidents who escaped attempts on their lives

In 1912, Roosevelt was running for the presidency on the Bull and Moose ticket. Saloon-owner John Schrank had begun stalking the former president after having an unusual dream.

According to “Killing the President: Assassinations, Attempts, and Rumored Attempts on U.S. Commanders-in-Chief,” Schrank wrote: “In a dream I saw President McKinley sit up in his coffin pointing at a man in a monk’s attire in whom I recognized Theodore Roosevelt. The dead President said, ‘This is my murderer — avenge my death.'”

Fortunately, Roosevelt had his notes with him when he was shot on October 14 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — 50 pages of them, folded in his breast pocket next to his metal glasses case. These objects slowed the bullet and saved Roosevelt’s life.

The ex-president continued to speak after letting his audience know he’d been shot, according to the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

“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,” he said in his speech.

He continued: “The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”

He finished the rest of his speech with a bullet in his ribs, where it remained until his death in 1919.

Seventeen days before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first presidential inauguration, the president-elect disembarked from his yacht and made a short speech in Miami, Florida on February 15, 1933. The Chicago Tribune reported that Chicago mayor Anton Cermak then approached Roosevelt for a short chat afterwards.

At that moment, anarchist Giuseppe Zangara opened fire. Roosevelt emerged from the attack unscathed, but Cermak was mortally wounded, along with onlooker Mabel Gill.

It’s unclear who Zangara intended to assassinate. He was arrested and went to the electric chair after 10 days on death row.

Ten years later, Soviet officials claimed to have uncovered a Nazi plan to murder Roosevelt and other world leaders at the Tehran Conference, according to “Eureka Summit: Agreement in Principle and the Big Three at Tehran, 1943.”

Arthur Bremer, who ultimately shot and paralyzed Alabama governor George Wallace, first considered targeting President Richard Nixon, The Washington Post reported.

A more high-profile Nixon assassination attempt came about on February 22, 1974. Samuel Byck shot and killed a police officer at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, raced through the security checkpoint, and broke onto a Delta flight to Atlanta, The New York Times reported. Hours earlier, he had mailed a tape to the Washington Post detailing his plan to hijack an airliner and crash it into the White House, in order to kill Nixon.

Once on board the aircraft, he shot both pilots, killing one, after he was told that they could not take off. Police shot Byck through the plane’s window, and he killed himself before he could be arrested.

On May 5, 1979, police arrested drifter Raymond Lee Harvey outside the Civic Center Mall in LA, 10 minutes before Jimmy Carter was scheduled to give a speech there.

Harvey had a starter pistol with several blank rounds, The Atlantic reported. Harvey claimed to be part of a cell that sought to assassinate Carter, but due to his history of mental illness, the men he named as co-conspirators were later released.

John Hinckley Jr., who would later attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, also considered shooting Carter in 1980, but backed out, the Dayton Daily News reported.

Three assassination attempts alone occurred in 1994. Ronald Gene Barbour sought to kill Clinton on his daily jog through the National Mall, The New York Times reported.

Later that year, Frank Eugene Corder rammed a red and white single-engine airplane onto the White House lawn in an attempt to kill Clinton, The New York Times reported. Corder died in the crash, while the Clintons were unharmed.

A month later in October, Francisco Martin Duran slipped a suicide note into his pocket and fired numerous shots at the north lawn, the Los Angeles Times reported. A group of tourists ultimately tackled Duran and he was arrested.

An assassination attempt later took place abroad during Clinton’s visit to Manila in 1996. A bomb was discovered under a bridge that the president’s motorcade was scheduled to travel over. The bomb plot was the work of al Qaeda, Reuters reported.

While Barack Obama was still a presidential candidate in 2008, two white supremacists named Paul Schlesselman and Daniel Cowart conspired to murder 102 African American men — while driving around in a getaway car with the words “Honk if you love Hitler” scrawled on it.

CBS News reported that their conspiracy would culminate with planning the assassination of Obama, but police uncovered the detailed plot and arrested the duo long before they were close to launching their cross-country murder spree.

Later, in 2011, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez opened fire on the White House after claiming that Obama was the anti-Christ, The Washington Post reported. He crashed his car while escaping, and was later arrested and sentenced to 27.5 years in jail. The Obamas were not in the White House at the time of the shooting.

In April 2013, a letter addressed to Obama tested positive for ricin, a deadly poison. James Everett Dutschke was sentenced to 25 years in jail for the ricin mailing plot, Politico reported.

Then, in 2015, CNN reported that three men — Abror Habibov, Abdurasul Juraboev, and Akhror Saidakhmetov — had been arrested after plotting to kill Obama and bomb Coney Island in their efforts to join ISIS.

Former President Donald Trump was rushed offstage after shots rang out during a rally on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. He was photographed raising his fist in the air with blood smeared on his face.

Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he was shot by “a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” One bystander died and two others were critically injured in the shooting, which is being investigated as an attempted assassination.

Authorities have not yet confirmed that Trump was shot in the ear.

The shooting wasn’t the first attempt on Trump’s life. At a 2016 campaign rally in a Las Vegas strip hotel casino, Michael Steven Sandford attempted to grab a police officer’s gun. As he was taken into custody, the British national told officers that he was hoping to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The Guardian reported that Sandford has a history of mental illness, which Judge James Mahan acknowledged in his hearing, saying that Sandford needed help and wasn’t a “hardened criminal” — or even intent on assassinating Trump.

“I know saying sorry is not enough,” Sandford told the court, the Guardian reported. “I really do feel awful about what I did. I wish there was some way to make things better. I have cost taxpayers so much money. I feel terrible.”

On May 6, KYT 24 reported that Sandford had been deported to the UK, after being in US custody for about 11 months.