To live and die by the sword: Will Trump's brush with death change him? | Cary McMullen
In January 1835, as President Andrew Jackson was walking through the Capitol rotunda, an unemployed bricklayer, who thought he was the rightful king of England, stepped forward, pointed a pistol at Jackson at close range and pulled the trigger.
The gun misfired. Enraged, Jackson raised his cane to strike the gunman, who produced a second pistol and pulled the trigger. It misfired as well. It was the first time anyone had attempted to assassinate an American president.
After the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last week, President Joe Biden and others have raised the chorus that violence “has no place in politics.” An aspirational sentiment, to be sure, but sadly at odds with the facts of our history.
In the 189 years between the attempts on Jackson and Trump, there have been 14 attempts to assassinate the president or a presidential candidate, an average of one every 13.5 years. Five of those attempts were successful – Lincoln (1864), Garfield (1881), McKinley (1901), John Kennedy (1963) and Robert Kennedy (1968). Four attempts nearly succeeded, resulting in the president or candidate wounded – Theodore Roosevelt (1912), George Wallace (1968), Reagan (1981) and Trump. Among bystanders or law enforcement officers, three were killed and 11 wounded.
And that doesn’t even include attempts on members of Congress, the federal judiciary and state and local politicians. Even as our society has collectively become less violent than it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and it has been 43 years since the last attempt on a president or candidate on American soil, there is something in the DNA of American politics that continues to lend itself to violence.
Which brings us to Donald Trump.
In a bold and insightful piece for The Atlantic, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote that the violence that Trump has long incited against his political enemies – climaxing on Jan. 6, 2021 – has now been visited upon him. It is likely, Frum said, that Trump will now become a martyr to the cause he leads.
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Frum writes, “Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life. … (T)he gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.”
It is worth noting that only four or five of the presidential assassination attempts were the result of real political grievances, most notably John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln. The majority were committed by men and women who were troubled, on the margins of society or like Richard Lawrence, who attacked Jackson, and John Hinckley Jr., who shot Reagan, downright delusional. They acted alone and not as part of some political conspiracy. The young man who shot Trump appears, from initial reports, to fall into that same sad category.
It is also notable that despite all this carnage, there never has been a coup d’etat in America. Our democratic codes and institutions, and the respect for them, have been strong enough to withstand these shocks – at least until now.
In reading Frum’s piece, I couldn’t help but think of a declaration given almost 2,000 years ago. As Jesus was being arrested and led away to be executed, one of his followers drew a sword to defend him. He said, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” The starkness of that truth should give us all pause.
Frum is correct that Trump and his followers seem to have forgotten that you cannot flirt with violence and even with the language of violence without subjecting yourself to the same climate of violence.
You have to wonder what kind of effect Trump’s very near brush with death might have on him. A man who has mocked dead American combat troops now knows a little something of what they faced. A taste of one’s own mortality can have a sobering effect.
At least we can hope.
Cary McMullen is a retired journalist and the former religion editor of The Ledger. He lives in Greensboro, NC.