DETROIT, MI – Donald Trump is not the first presidential candidate to have been shot at during a campaign, or even the second or third. He’s the fourth, and the other three all had two things in common. To begin with, all had a Michigan connection.
Theodore Roosevelt had the first and probably most dramatic attempt made on his life, under circumstances that most closely resembled what happened to Trump this July 13. Like Trump, he was a former Republican president who wanted to win back his old office, and on Oct. 12, 1912, he was in Milwaukee, coincidentally the city where this year’s GOP convention was held.
He was on his way to give a speech when one John Schrenk rushed up with a revolver and shot TR directly in the chest. Had teleprompters been invented then, Teddy would have died instantly.
But instead, he had a metal glasses case and his speech, folded over into a wad equivalent to more than a hundred pages. The bullet passed through all that and continued on into his chest, but stopped short of his heart. Roosevelt insisted on speaking for more than an hour, and began by telling the crowd what happened and adding, “but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!”
Though TR was a famous hunter, the bull moose reference was not just to the animal but referred to his political party. Denied the Republican presidential nomination (he thought he’d been cheated out of it) he formed a third Progressive or “Bull Moose” party.
There was no Secret Service protection for presidential candidates in those days, and accounts said the candidate himself prevented his would-be assassin from being killed by the enraged crowd. Schrenk was later declared insane, after he explained that the ghost of William McKinley had asked him to kill Roosevelt. He then spent the rest of his life in an asylum, outliving Roosevelt by 24 years.
Ironically, Roosevelt disagreed with the insanity diagnosis, noting that his nemesis had been following him from state to state and fired the shot in Wisconsin, which did not have a death penalty.
His bravado made Teddy Roosevelt a national hero, and nowhere more than in Michigan, where newspapers lionized him and where he won by a landslide on Election Day. Unfortunately for him, he only won five other states.
The next time someone campaigning for President was shot was May 15, 1972, when Alabama segregationist governor George Wallace was shot and paralyzed for life at a rally in Laurel, Maryland, by a maladjusted 21-year-old named Arthur Bremer.
What few knew was that Bremer had intended to kill Wallace at a rally in Kalamazoo two days before, but did not because he was afraid of injuring some “stupid 15-year-olds nearby.” The day after the shooting Wallace, a former third-party candidate who was trying for the Democratic presidential nomination, won the Michigan primary in a stupendous landslide following a record turnout; his primary vote total wasn’t surpassed until Joe Biden did it in 2020.
The severe physical damage the shooting did ended Wallace’s campaign, however. Bremer served 35 years in prison and is now out on probation that ends next year. Wallace, who for the rest of his life endured near-constant agony after the shooting, died in 1998.
Perhaps the oddest assassination attempts were those aimed at President Gerald Ford, the longtime congressman from Grand Rapids, who was nearly killed in two incidents staged by two deranged women only 17 days apart, both occurring while Ford was campaigning in California in September 1975.
In the first, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of cult leader Charles Manson, tried to kill the president in Sacramento because she thought his policies were endangering California’s giant redwood trees, but didn’t realize she needed a bullet in the chamber of her gun.
On Sept. 22, while Ford was campaigning in San Francisco, a 45-year-old woman named Sara Jane Moore shot at the President, but narrowly missed because she had a defective gun sight. A former Marine named Oliver Sipple tackled her when she fired again, deflecting the bullet and injuring a taxi driver.
Moore, a former housewife who had four children, said her goal was to start a violent revolution in America. Oddly enough, though President Ford has been dead since 2006, Fromme and Moore both have completed their sentences and are alive and free.
What’s remarkable about all these incidents is that in every case, the shooters survived the men they tried to kill by decades, unlike the man who apparently intended to kill Donald Trump. But while the attempts resulted in an outpouring of sympathy for Teddy Roosevelt and Gerald Ford, both lost their elections, and George Wallace was too damaged to keep running. Whether Trump breaks that streak in November remains to be seen.
