Brushes With Death
By Ed West – Wrong Side of History, July, 2024
History’s most notorious failed assassinations
It’s been reported that, according to some Japanese conservative pundits, at the moment he was shot last Saturday Donald Trump heard Shinzo Abe’s ‘voice and moved out of the path of the bullet’. Whether or not they actually believe this or they’re in on the joke, this story originated from a meme that went around Twitter very soon after the failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
Trump escaped death by the narrowest of margins, and the truth of his miraculous survival is itself slightly bizarre; that he turned his head at the last minute to point to a chart of illegal immigration numbers. ‘If I hadn’t pointed at that chart and turned my head to look at it, that bullet would have hit me right in the head’, he said afterwards.
We think of American politics as being unusually violent, in part because of the memory of the 1960s when four prominent public figures were killed by assassins. America’s history of four murdered presidents also stands in contrast to Britain’s one slain prime minister, poor Spencer Perceval back in 1812, yet the last sitting American federal politician to be assassinated was way back in 1978, since when six British MPs have been murdered.
It’s not like there haven’t been numerous attempts to assassinate more presidents; one of the most famous, and cited variously after Trump’s belligerent response last weekend, was the October 1912 shooting of Theodore Roosevelt. The former president, running again for office, was due to give a speech in Milwaukee when he was struck in the chest. Teddy Roosevelt was saved by a steel eyeglass case and a 50-page copy of his speech – titled ‘Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual’ – which stopped the bullet doing more damage.
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