Every President Who Survived Multiple Assassination Plots

While assassination attempts against United States presidents are definitely not an everyday occurrence, they do happen more regularly than the reader might think. While Abraham Lincoln was the first president to be shot and killed in 1865, Andrew Jackson was the first president to survive an assassination attempt 30 years earlier in 1835. Back then, disgruntled and unemployed painter Richard Lawrence slid towards the president at a public funeral, lifted his gun, took aim, and the gun misfired. Lawrence then pulled another gun, took aim, and that gun also misfired. While we could potentially count Lawrence's attempts as two failed assassination attempts, it's least two failed gunshots.

Other presidents, however, not only survived multiple gunshots but multiple assassination plots. JFK came to the same fate as Lincoln, Ronald Reagan was shot but survived, Franklin Roosevelt came under fire but was never hit, but Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all survived multiple attempts on their lives. Sometimes, skilled Secret Service intervention saved their lives. Sometimes, assassin were simply incompetent.

Some of these presidential assassination attempts were as straightforward as a single person with gun, like recent attacks against Trump. Other attempts involved convoluted plots and multiple conspirators, like when al Qaeda planned to kill Clinton with a bridge bomb in 1996. Others attempts were ridiculous enough to make one wonder what the assassin was thinking, like when Omar J. Gonzalez jumped the White House fence in 2014 and ran at the building with a knife.

President Harry S. Truman came into power at the end of World War II in 1945 and finished his second term in 1953. Presiding over the United States' transition from World War II to its decades-long Cold War with the U.S.S.R., the White House quotes Truman as once saying, "I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me." Truman made a good target for people's woes not once, but twice.

As The New York Times recounted, militant Zionist group "the Stern gang" sent some cream-colored envelopes to the White House in 1947 filled with "powdered gelignite, a pencil battery and a detonator" meant to explode when opened. The bombs were mailed from Italy, but not much more is known about them. As for the motivation behind the attack, the e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary explains that while Truman supported the creation of Israel in 1948, he also advocated for Palestinian sovereignty over Palestinian areas within the Holy Land.

Per the National Archives, Truman's second survived assassination attempt also featured militant nationals, this time Puerto Rican. Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola — two members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PRNP), which had advocated for independence from the United States since 1922 — crept up to the presidential Blair House shortly after 2pm on November 1, 1950. Pistols in hand, they hoped to shoot through Secret Service guards and kill Truman. Instead, the inexperienced gunmen bungled the job and were gunned down, but not before Torresola mortally wounded policeman Leslie Coffelt. 

The inheritor of Richard Nixon's resignation and the ongoing Vietnam War (1954 to 1975), Gerald Ford was nonetheless well-received when he took over Nixon's second term in 1974. And yet, Ford wound up being targeted for assassination twice within the same month, both times by ill-prepared gunwomen under strange circumstances. 

On September 5, 1975, a tiny lady carrying a big gun (a Colt .45, to be specific) and wearing a "hand-sewn Little Red Riding Hood outfit," per History.com, walked up to President Ford near Sacramento's Capitol Park as Ford walked to a meeting. But rather than shake Ford's hand like he was expecting, the woman lifted her gun. She was immediately disarmed by Secret Service agents, who found her gun unloaded. She wound up spending 34 years in prison. The 26-year-old Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme was a member of the Manson Family and wanted to kill Ford for his supposed crimes against Californian redwood trees.

Seventeen days later on September 22, Sara Jane Moore took aim at Ford as he left his San Franciscan hotel to head to a nearby AFL-CIO political convention. She got off two shots, missed Ford but hit someone in the crowd who survived, and stayed in prison until 2008. She thought her that actions could "save the world," as the Los Angeles Times quotes Columbia professor Todd Gitlin. She had also undergone psychiatric treatment and was arrested a mere two days prior with a .44 revolver in her purse.

Bill Clinton took over during a stable, prosperous decade in U.S. history from 1993 to 2001. Nonetheless, his presidency preceded the U.S.' "War on Terror" during the George W. Bush administration, and thus presaged growing, global sociopolitical instabilities. Such instabilities account for one of the assassination attempts against Clinton.

The first attempt on Clinton's life was far from politically motivated, though. As Politico writes, 38-year-old Frank Eugene Corner flew a small airplane straight into the White House lawn in 1994, apparently aiming for Clinton's bedroom but falling short. At the time, The New York Times explained that Corner had been suicidal in the weeks leading up to the attack and experienced a number of personal setbacks related to his career and marriage. He'd also been arrested on drug charges the year prior in 1993. 

The second attempt on Clinton's life came from terrorist organization al Qaeda in 1996. As Reuters explains, the attempt took place in Manilla in the Philippines, where Filipino authorities discovered a bomb on a bridge and AK-47s in a nearby SUV. The plot, it seems, was to detonate the bomb as Clinton's motorcade passed over the bridge. Reuters states that it received its information from retired Secret Service agents, as the incident was kept under wraps. Two years later in 1998, relatedly or not, The Washington Post says that Clinton approved multiple plans to capture and/or kill al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Folks might not realize exactly how many assassination attempts Barack Obama survived. In what is an almost comically long list of foiled assassination plots — many of which are bizarre, if not daffy — Obama (2009 to 2017) drew the ire of white supremacists, paramilitary organizations, former U.S. servicemen, jihadists, KKK-members with a homemade "death ray," a minor actor, an Elvis impersonator, and more. Many plots never made it past the planning phase. Some took place even before Obama took office.

The U.S. Justice Department explains that Marine Lance Corporal Kody Brittingham plotted to assassinate Obama ahead of Obama's inauguration and was sentenced to 100 months in prison. That same year, in 2008, the Independent explains that white supremacists Tharin Gartrell, Shawn Robert Adolf, and Nathan Johnson got caught by Denver police traveling to the Democratic National Convention in a truck full of guns and meth. 

Meanwhile, per the Daily Beast, Army veterans Private Isaac Aguigui, Private First Class Michael Burnett, Sergeant Anthony Peden, and Private Christopher Salmon — members of the paramilitary organization FEAR, aka "Forever Enduring, Always Ready" — plotted in 2012 not only to assassinate Obama, but overthrow the U.S. government. Two years later in 2014, Iraq War veteran Omar J. Gonzalez jumped the White House fence with a knife to hunt Obama, as The Washington Post reports.

Out of the numerous other assassination attempts on Obama's life, actress Shannon Guess Richardson and Elvis impersonator James Everett Dutschke stand out. In 2014, they both tried mailing Obama ricin in envelopes.

And so we come to Donald Trump, the most recent president to survive multiple assassination attempts. Three of these attempts happened during Trump's actual presidency from 2017 to 2021, but have been overshadowed by the recent shootings against Trump mere months apart in 2024.

The first presidential assassination attempt on Trump featured a forklift as a weapon and so falls firmly in the whacky category. In September, 2017, 42-year-old Gregory Lee Leingang targeted Trump during Trump's visit to a North Dakota oil refinery. U.S. Assistant State's Attorney Brandi Sasse Russell said on the Grand Forks Herald (via The Washington Post), "The intent was to basically try to get to the limo, flip the limo and get to the president, and he wanted to kill the president." At some point Leingang gave up because the forklift got stuck in a "gated area." Police caught him as he was trying to run away. 

The next two assassination attempts featured the ricin-in-an-envelope trick, both of which failed. William Clyde Allen tried in 2018, and Pascale Cecile Veronique Ferrier tried in 2020.

And of course, we've got the attempt on Trump's life by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024. Crooks was shot and killed on the scene. Most recently, we've got 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, who took shots at Trump on September 16 while Trump was playing golf at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh was apprehended and facts about his case are currently surfacing.