What A Day - Will the Trump Assassination Attempt Change the 2024 Race?

Episode Date: July 20, 2024

Since the moment someone shot Donald Trump last weekend, we’ve been hearing the same thing: this election’s over, and it’s going to Trump. But the course of this race—and American politics more broadly—will probably change less than you think. Tre’vell and Max take a look at past assassination attempts in the U.S. and abroad to explain why surviving violent attacks does not guarantee an election victory. Has any politician successfully leveraged these assaults for political gain? Which US president survived two assassination attempts in one month? How would this have played out if Trump were in office? Listen to this week’s How We Got Here to find out.

So, Max, from the moment we got the news that someone tried to shoot Trump, I feel like my timeline has been filled with the same reaction. Right. It's over. Yes, it's over. If Trump wasn't already headed for victory, he sure is now. And then the photo hit. The photo. Everyone's like, this is gonna be in our grandkids' textbooks. It's going to turn Trump into a heroic figure. It's one image that will change the course of history. I think you heard Speaker Johnson reflect on part of it, which is that something

has fundamentally been changed in our politics, potentially in our culture and political discourse. But what will that look like? That was Kristen Welker, the host of Meet the Press on the Today Show, summing up the reaction. But Travelle, you're wondering, is any of this true? Today, we're gonna find out. We are. And I think the answer is gonna surprise people. I'm Max Fisher. And I'm Travelle Anderson, filling in for Aaron Ryan. This is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. Our question this week, is the failed assassination attempt on Trump going to change the course of this race or even American politics more broadly?

And I know listeners might be thinking, how could you possibly tell the future? Well, luckily, we don't have to, because like my granny used to say, history can be our teacher. Yes. In today's episode, we have a few stories for you. They are all about previous failed assassination attempts against political candidates. And of course, no one past example is going to be exactly like today. Right. But we can identify certain lessons and trends from how those have all played out. Should we give away the ending here, Travelle,

and just kind of tell people what we think will happen? Well, I would just say that if you're worried that this event is going to usher Trump into office or forever change the course of our history, I think today's show may help put you at ease. Totally. All right, let's get into it. We're going to start with George C. Wallace, the infamous former Alabama governor and hardcore segregationist. Wallace, like a lot of Southern segregationists, was a Democrat. He ran in the Democratic presidential primary a few different times. And our story starts in the 1972 Democratic primary. Max, set the scene for us.

Okay, so the Democratic primary that year was a crowded field. Nixon had been president for four years. The Vietnam War was on. It all felt very high stakes. And Wallace was considered a credible candidate. Meaning people thought he could win, in other words. They did. Yeah. Wallace won Florida in the primary, plus a bunch of Southern states, and he came in second in a lot of the Rust Belt. And that brings us up to the assassination attempt. Yes. That May, Wallace was holding a campaign rally in Maryland, which was having its primary the next day. And a 21-year-old man walked up to Wallace, shot him several times with a revolver.

The shooter later said he did it for fame, so not politically motivated. But our question, the reason we're bringing this up, is to ask whether or not this attempt on George Wallace's life changed anything politically. To get an answer to that, I spoke to a historian named Matthew Dalek. Matthew is a professor at George Washington University, and he is writing a book on, of all things, failed presidential assassination attempts. Sounds like our guy. to the extent we can the effect of that failed assassination attempt against George Wallace. As you alluded to, he did win two primaries the very next day in Maryland and Michigan. I've seen them referred to as sympathy votes to some extent. But from then on in the primary, he didn't really do all that well. Texas is the only state that he won in the entire rest of the primary. So

would you say that it's right to say that the assassination attempt, even beyond that little burst of the sympathy votes in the next day, didn't really make him a martyr or hero and did not really seem to do much good for him in the primary? I think that's fair to say. I'm not sure how well he was going to do had there not been an attempt on him. Right. I mean, we'll never know that, obviously. But, you know, it's not as if he was poised to. I mean, I mean, just he was attacked. He was paralyzed. He couldn't really campaign. So that, you know, took him out physically off the campaign trail. And look, I think it certainly he engendered sympathy among some of his supporters. But in terms of electorally and running in the general credit primary, it did, you know, end his campaign, I think, for all intents and purposes. And it may have, I mean, this is more speculation than anything else, but it may have reminded at least some voters of him as a violent figure, right? I

mean, not that, of course, you would ever blame him for being shot at by this 21-year-old gunman. But, you know, violence, really massive resistance to civil rights, the violent opposition to civil rights from the 1960s, he was, I think, very much associated with that kind of violent resistance. And so, you know, this violence sort of following him around, I think it does kind of etch him in the past in American history as a figure in the story of political violence as a whole. So Wallace did stay on the ballot when Texas came in second in a few states, but his support really did fall away after that. So, Treville, what lessons do you take from this for the election going on today?

Well, I'm hearing that sympathy, right? This idea that people might, you know, change their vote or change their feelings, right? Based on an assassination attempt only lasts so long, right? It isn't something that, you know, looking at what we're going through right now with Trump, theoretically will last until November, right? Because we're out of primary season. We're not, we don't have those kind of regular, you know, happenings, right, that would

show us that. That's the first thing that jumps out to me that, you know, is a little reassuring, you know, based on what I've been hearing people say. George Wallace also went on to, I think, as a direct result of this, renounce his segregationist views, which I don't think that something similar feels like it's happening with Trump we totally hope right yeah it doesn't feel like he's moderating something else i thought was really interesting about this story is that there was a sense in the nixon white house that who got blamed for the assassination would be really important for the election to the extent that nixon even sent his dirty tricksters to try to plant left-wing campaign material in the shooters home to try to get

him pinned as a left-winger. Nixon was really worried that if he was pinned as a right-winger, it would be bad for him going into the election. And it ended up being that he was just seen as kind of a lone, ideologically confused person with no political sympathies. But it's just to say there's an idea that I think we will come back to that how people perceive the political motivation of the shooter will influence what effect it has on politics. Absolutely. Okay, let's move on to our second big story here. Former President Gerald Ford and the attempted assassinations, yes, plural, that he faced during his own presidential primary. Ford, of course, had been hastily appointed vice president in 1973 as part of the Watergate scandal.

And then when Nixon resigned in 1974, Ford became president. So nobody actually voted for him. Right, which is part of why in 1975, when he announced that he would run for re-election, he knew that his party was not just going to automatically accept him as the presidential nominee. He would have to run in a real primary. Against, as it turned out, former California governor Ronald Reagan. Yeah, it turned out that guy had a political future.

A poll of Republicans from the start of that, July 1975, had Ford at 41% support and Reagan at 20% support. Which is to say that it was Ford's race to lose, but he was also not exactly beloved. And that brings us to September 1975 and the two, yes, two assassination attempts on Ford. Here again is Matthew Dalek, the historian on what happened. The first attempt was, I believe, in Sacramento. And a member of the Charles Manson family, who was a mass murderer, quite notorious, a member of that family, she had a handgun and brandished it and kind of pointed it forward. And actually, it was pretty close

to going off and could have killed him. I mean, it really was a near miss. And then 17 days later in San Francisco, Ford was exiting a hotel. And this is 17 days after that first attempt. A woman, an anti-war radical named Sarah Jane Moore pulled out a handgun and took a shot at him, although apparently a bystander, a Vietnam vet, saw her gun and I think knocked her hand away. So the bullet fired, but it missed Ford. And of course, coming on the heels of the three assassinations in the 60s, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, you know, the country was still very much, I think, traumatized. And the level of violence, too, in the early 70s was quite high. And Ford, I think, actually acquitted himself quite admirably.

You know, he was very low key about it. He said that he, you know, was going to continue to be president, try to kind of roll back some of the trappings of the imperial presidency, you know, sort of a statement in a way against Richard Nixon and against the abuses of power. Ford said he would still be a man of the people, still kind of go out with the public. There are certain risks in life, but he was willing to accept them. And he was pretty magnanimous, I think, and just kind of steady. And yet he also, at the same time, didn't necessarily try to reap any political benefits from these attempts. So like Dalek said, Ford did not really try to politicize the assassination attempts beyond projecting stoicism by saying he wouldn't let them deter him from campaigning.

But Reagan did politicize the attacks. He called them an indictment on soft on crime policies. He blamed Congress and the ACLU, and he said it proved that Ford had gone too far in reining in the intelligence agencies. But our question is, did any of this matter for the race that he and Reagan were in? Right. OK. I asked Matthew Dalek this, and he said, there's really no evidence that it moved the race at all one way or another. Ford did go on to win, but Reagan got 46% of the vote, making his campaign one of the most successful primaries against an incumbent president in history. And then, of course, Ford lost the presidential election against Jimmy Carter. Right. It turned out those two assassins weren't the only people who didn't like him. So, Trevelle, this has me reflecting on how much of

the commentary this week says that Trump's surviving an assassination attempt is a game changer for the 2024 race. Right. And if that's true, then why, when the same thing happened to Ford, did it amount to a big nothing? Yeah, if one failed attempt is supposed to turn Trump into a national martyr, you'd think two attempts on Ford would put his face on Mount Rushmore. And one of the attempts was by a member of the damn Manson family. It don't get more dramatic than that. I put this to Matthew Dallek. Here's what he said. So jumping ahead to Trump and what happened last week, I think my initial reaction to that was to think, wow, this is such an extreme and shocking event that it will surely change the course of this

entire race, if not like American political history. But it sounds like maybe past evidence from these earlier cases suggests that it won't do that. Why is that, do you think? In more cases than not, I think the subjects of these assassination attempts don't benefit politically in a sustained way and in an expected way, right? One would anticipate, right, that there would be this kind of rally around the president or in this case, former president effect. Even Teddy Roosevelt, right, who was famously shot in the chest and continued to speak for more than an hour as he was bleeding in 1912. He was running on a third party ticket that had a real impact on his image and how he responded. But he didn't win that election. Right. It wasn't really that close. So there are, I think, limits to these assassination attempts and what happens politically.

Well, Max, we have to talk about another much more recent case that is also getting compared to the Trump assassination. Yes, you are talking about my boy Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump of the tropics, as they call him in Brazil, where he became president in 2019, served for catastrophic years and after losing re-election, tried to do his own very clumsy little January 6th. Right. So back in 2018, while Bolsonaro was campaigning for the presidency, he got stabbed. To Bolsonaro supporters, this has become the key moment in his mythology, the thing that supposedly won him the race. Yeah, even just after the Trump shooting last week, one of Bolsonaro's sons tweeted something to the effect of, you know, take it from us, Trump surviving an attack means this election is over and he has already won. And so to find out whether or not that's right, I spoke to Roberta Braga, who studies Latin American politics and is the director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas. Here's Roberta. The first thing that happened was that

the voters began to paint the election as a sure thing, saying that he had already won. So following the stabbing, he was glorified and people started to say this election's over. He's clearly the winner. And that really set, I think, the agenda for conversation and media coverage. The second thing that happened was that people downplayed the attack. And so the opposition really began to make fun of the incident, to portray the incident as having been a setup or orchestrated by Bolsonaro himself for his campaign to get him ahead in the polls and in the voting. The third thing that happened was that the religious rhetoric took off. So there were a lot of posts saying that because he survived the stabbing, he was anointed by God, saved by God, and appointed by God to be the next president of Brazil.

And so he was predestined, they said, to be president. And that's why he should win. So some context here is that when the stabbing happened, Bolsonaro was already far ahead in the polls. So that's part of why his supporters saw the race as effectively over. So, Cheryl, I reported on this election, and I will be honest with you, I have always been kind of skeptical that Bolsonaro getting stabbed affected the race one way or another. And why is that? Okay, well, if you look at the trajectory of the polls over the course of that race,

Bolsonaro had been rising steadily for a while when the stabbing happened. And the stabbing didn't speed up that rise or slow it down. You can't see any change in the polls from it at all. And actually, right after the stabbing, Bolsonaro's main rival saw his poll numbers surge. It looked like Bolsonaro was maybe going to lose until his numbers did recover a few weeks later amid a corruption scandal involving the left-wing party that I think was probably more important to him winning. Yeah, I actually asked Roberta about this. Here's what she said. I want to ask a bit about the point you made that Bolsonaro and his supporters basically suggested that the assassination attempt, that the stabbing was central in getting him elected because it drove support to him. That's at least what we're, you know,

supposed to believe, right, happened. I want to hear from you now that we're, you know, a few years out from this incident. Is that actually what happened? Because, you know, we look at the polls and it kind of makes it hard to tell whether or not the stabbing itself, right, led to, you know, him eventually getting elected or whether there was a variety of other things that could have, you know, contributed to that. So I would say that it's really hard to attribute his winning to this singular event. I agree with you. What we saw were confluence of factors, like he was already receiving really high levels of support. Brazil is a very polarized country. In this case, in 2018, the very far left

and the very far right candidates were competing. And so people were divided already. So I wouldn't say that this necessarily led to him winning. We can't say that for sure. But we did see him rise in the polling a bit after the incident. And then what happened was that the polling numbers reaffirmed certain narratives, which then reaffirmed polling numbers. And that cycle kind of continued. And so I think, again, it was kind of an agenda setting thing that happened after the stabbing, where people said, he's a lion, he's a survivor, he's so brave for having undergone these surgeries after this attack. So, Travelle, something else I worry about is that Trump facing this assassination attempt,

even if it doesn't alter the race itself, could bring out his worst, most authoritarian tendencies. Is that something that happened with Bolsonaro, do you think? Roberta and I talked about that as well. Here's what she said when I asked what, if anything, the attack changed in Bolsonaro's politics. My simple answer to that would be not much. So I don't know that the stabbing actually influenced any particular policy that he put out. I do think it influenced a bit how the opposition was talked about and framed. Among his supporters, there was a heavy demonization of the Workers' Party and anyone affiliated with the far left in Brazil.

That's something that we're seeing here in the U.S. already as well. There were claims that at the time Haddad, who had been the person that kind of took over after Lula was arrested, that Haddad had orchestrated this to get Bolsonaro out of the running. There were also claims about a deep state. That's again, something that we're seeing here about a global elite that's kind of working behind the scenes to determine the outcome of the election. But no, I don't think that it necessarily drove him to put out new policy. It did give him what he needed to paint the left as the enemy a little bit more. And his supporters definitely took that on for him. So, Treville, what do you think?

What does this Bolsonaro story tell us about this moment? Well, I think back to what Roberta just said about how the opposition side, right, is able to paint, right, a particular group of people as evil, as responsible. And we've seen even in this moment how the Republicans, right, are blaming the Biden administration and their rhetoric, right, for the shooter attempting to, you know,ald trump um and that's that's something that that sticks out to me what about for you yeah i noticed the same thing it feels like the bolsonaro stabbing reified what he believed in his supporters believed which is that like he's invincible but the deep state is out to get him and everybody's conspiring against him and he has to like fight for the people and what's kind of striking is that, I think to people like us who are outside of that coalition, this might look like, and my initial reaction was like, oh my God, this will accelerate those politics and make them so much worse because it'll be proved. But the thing is,

they really did already believe that. So I think for them, it was actually not even a big changer because they were like, all right, we already knew the deep state was trying to kill Bolsonaro, which it wasn't, but they thought. So it kind of didn't change their politics in a meaningful way. And I think now that we're a few days out from the Trump assassination attempt, we are actually seeing the kind of the same thing. I really worried this was going to bring out his worst tendencies, his supporters' worst tendencies, paranoia, conspiracism. But the thing is, is they already believe- They're already wild. Right. Yeah. Right. They already believe they were at war with the deep state and you know the democratic conspiracy so they're kind of like okay well we'll continue with the great civil

war that we're fighting one of the things that roberta also said that stuck with me is about the potential globalization right of this narrative take a listen one thing that i think is important to talk about is movements are coordinated and they amplify each other's content and they talk. And so nowadays, misinformation and conspiracy theories are very borderless. They're very cyclical, especially among Latinos, Portuguese, Spanish speakers who have connections to home. Immediately following the attack on Donald Trump on Saturday, we saw his sons engaging with content from Bolsonaro's sons, drawing connections between the two instances of violence and borders to reaffirm each other's values and identities and points of view, because that really can lead to a globalization of the narrative. Our last story is about Robert Fizzo, the prime minister of Slovakia, who survived a shooting just this last May.

Fizzo wasn't running for office when it happened. He was already prime minister. But I wanted to talk about his story because I think it speaks to how an attempted assassination can affect politics more broadly. Fizzo is a very Trumpy figure, right? Far right, autocratic, conspiratorial. So it feels applicable. I spoke to Dalibor Rohatz about this. Dalibor is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and has written about the lessons for America in Fico's attempted assassination. So tell us about this assassination attempt from May and what we know about what happened, who did it. Well, so Slovak cabinet was having one of their meetings outside of the capital in a small town in central Slovakia. After the cabinet meeting, ministers went out

to greet the crowd. it was not a massive crowd it was a couple dozen people and there was this older man 71 year old who had previously worked as a security guard he was retired who had a gun and he shot the prime minister

four or five times thankfully he didn't really kill him but he was in ICU for a number of weeks, and he's only slowly making a return to public life now. The shooter was somebody who very clearly was very online, very preoccupied with politics, and seemingly confused. Now, do we know anything about why this guy tried to kill the prime minister? I feel like we are learning, as you mentioned earlier, that how a shooter's motives are perceived can end up mattering a whole lot

for what impact an assassination attempt can have on politics. Totally. Here's what Dalibor had to say. So his political opinions have been all over the place. He was anti-Roma. Slovakia has the size of the Roma population, which is target of sort of casual racism and all kinds of discrimination. And he was also preoccupied with this crisis of civility in Slovak politics, the sort of rhetoric that kept being ratcheted up. And all of his opponents have been at some point or other accused of being morally suspect or on the payroll of the United States and so on and so forth.

So this guy was clearly reacting to this heavily polarized atmosphere that exists in Slovakia, which again would be very familiar to somebody from the United States. Yeah, I was going to say this also sounds like a very familiar figure, someone who is personally and individually very ideologically confused and all over the place, but also exists in a context that is extremely polarized and paranoid. And so now for our big question, did this change anything? Did it make the prime minister more popular, less popular, more autocratic, less autocratic? Okay, that answer I think in retrospect, it looks like it accelerated pre-existing trends rather than changing the dynamics. So already before the assassination attempt, Vica was intent on entrenching himself in power

in some way or another. And that trend has continued. So the governing coalition has passed legislation basically ending the public broadcasting status of Slovakia's public broadcaster, TV and radio, bringing it under political control. They are now playing with an idea for a law that would require NGOs requiring foreign funding to register as foreign agents, again, in a move that's

reminiscent of Hungary and Russia and more recently, Georgia. And there was a kind of package of laws passed in the aftermath of the shooting that restricts right to protest. So, Treville, these four stories that we told today, what lessons do you take away from them kind of all together? What do you think history tells us about the likely consequences of this attempt on Trump? I think history is telling everyone to, you know, wipe their brow and breathe a little easier, right? But to also not ignore, right, what we are witnessing and what we are seeing. I think one of the biggest takeaways for me is that in every situation, the assassination attempt just kind of further confirmed people's thoughts, like they were able to take it and twist it into whatever narrative was, you know, best serving

for them, right? Which I think when we recognize that right as voters, as people witnessing that, then it allows us to just navigate what they're saying to us a little better. Right. Yeah, I agree. I think I feel like it's unlikely this will change the course of the race. Doesn't seem like it's changing Trump's numbers. Doesn't seem like it is much changing his politics or his supporters politics beyond confirming what they already thought was happening. The kind of FITSO lesson from Slovakia does have me a little worried where he became so much more authoritarian. But I think something important for kind of understanding how to situate that against the United States is this study about the consequences of failed assassinations that has been circulating a little bit this week. It got written up at The Atlantic. It's called Hit or Miss, the Effect of Assassinations on

Institutions and War by the political scientists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olkin. And one of the things that it found is that a failed assassination attempt against an autocratic leader does lead them to be more autocratic, more authoritarian. And that's something that we saw in Slovakia. But a failed assassination against a democratic leader does not have any effect on whether or not the country becomes more or less autocratic. So I think that the fact that this happened to Trump when he was out of office, rather than the fact that when he was in office and would have had the tools at his disposal to immediately say like, okay, we're banning peaceful protests, you might say,

Travell, we dodged a bullet. I know, it's terrible. I'm so sorry. Thank you for letting me get away with that. It's a very generous appeal. It happened.

There's nothing to be done. There was a poll that came out a couple days ago where it asked people to say what they think the motivation of the shooter was. I feel like that's something we've learned is really important. If people blamed the left or the right for the shooting, that can change politics. And the number one answer is that people said deranged shooter. And the number two answer that people had was that the thing that caused the shooting was Trump and his own rhetoric. Distant number three was people blame Biden and the Democrats. Then after that, they blame

political polarization, gun control. So people think that this was kind of a lone person who did not represent anything. And in fact, we have gotten from the reporting that's come out since that this guy was just Googling like any presidential candidate who is going to come to his town. so i think that the narrative that is gelling around this based on what we know from past attempts makes me think that this is not the worst case that i initially thought it was going to be yeah everybody just breathe a little easier okay i love that i love that for all of us i do yeah it's nice to be able to tell people for once like actually you know i don't know if we can go as far as saying it's all going to be okay, but

this one specific thing. This one very specific thing is not as bad as you think. Okay. Let's go out on some assassination analysis from one Marjorie Taylor Greene, that's the How We Got Here assassination analysis lead correspondent, who shared

a very strange theory of who did this and why. It's also pretty interesting. I'll go ahead and say it. And I really don't care what people think about me for saying this. You know, here we go. All of a sudden, we're being told that that Iran has had an assassination plot attempt coming out. Well, yeah, no kidding. They chant death to America every single day. Is this some sort of surprise? Or is this the next country that the deep state wants to bomb in reaction to this? She's wild. I thought she made some good points.

Did you now? Did you now? How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Erin Ryan. It's produced by Emma Illick-Frank. Evan Sutton mixes and edits the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Production support from Adrienne Hill, Leo Duran, Erica Morrison, Raven Yamamoto, and Natalie Bettendorf. And a special thank you to What A Day's talented hosts, Traevel Anderson, Priyanka Arabindi, Josie Duffy-Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family. you