Several of the 46 Presidents of the United States have faced assassination attempts, four of which were successful, while most failed. The latest was the attempt on former President and presidential candidate Donald Trump.
**Assassination Attempts:**
1. **39th President Jimmy Carter**
On May 5, 1979, Los Angeles police arrested Raymond Lee Harvey outside the Civic Center shopping mall just ten minutes before President Carter was set to give a speech there. He was carrying a gun and several magazines, according to *The Atlantic*. Harvey claimed to be a member of a cell that planned to assassinate Carter.
2. **40th President Ronald Reagan**
President Reagan nearly lost his life on March 30, 1981. As he was about to leave the Washington Hilton Hotel to head to his limousine, John Hinckley Jr. shot him. Reagan was hit in the chest, but the medical team saved his life.
3. **42nd President Bill Clinton**
Former President Bill Clinton was the target of several assassination plots during his presidency, three of which occurred in 1994. According to *The New York Times*, Ronald Gene Barbour attempted to assassinate the president while he was jogging, and later that year, Frank Eugene Cudor crashed his small plane into the White House grounds in an attempt on Clinton's life, dying in the incident. A month later, Francisco Martin Duran fired several shots at the White House but was tackled by a group of nearby tourists and arrested.
4. **43rd President George W. Bush**
In February 2001, Robert Pickett, a former IRS employee suffering from mental illnesses, fired several shots at the White House before being shot in the knee by a protective officer while President Bush was exercising in the White House lawn. In 2006, during an event in Tbilisi, Georgia, a Georgian nationalist threw a grenade towards the presidents and other officials, but it did not explode.
5. **44th President Barack Obama**
When Barack Obama was a presidential candidate in 2008, Paul Schlesselman and Daniel Cowart planned to kill 102 African Americans, with Obama being one of the targets, but they were arrested before executing their plan. In 2011, Oscar Ramiro Ortega Hernandez shot at the White House but crashed while fleeing and claimed that Obama was the Antichrist. He was sentenced to 27.5 years. In April 2013, a letter addressed to Obama was tested and found to contain ricin poison, leading to James Everett Dutschke receiving a 25-year prison sentence. In 2015, CNN reported that authorities arrested three men—Abarov Habibov, Abdul Rasul Guryabov, and Akhmatov Akhor—on charges of plotting to assassinate Obama and joining ISIS.
6. **45th President Donald Trump**
Trump had to cut short his speech due to gunfire sounds, and he was whisked away by security, with blood on his ear.
**Successful Assassinations:**
1. **16th President Abraham Lincoln**, assassinated in April 1865.
2. **20th President James Garfield**, assassinated in July 1881 before completing his fourth month in office.
3. **25th President William McKinley**, assassinated in September 1901 in New York.
4. **35th President John F. Kennedy**, assassinated in Texas in 1963.
