The annual White House Correspondents' Dinner gathers many of the country's leading political journalists alongside the president and other senior officials for a night of joking and levity. An event that already felt somewhat out of place in the tense, heightened political atmosphere of the contemporary United States nearly turned into a horror show for the ages on April 25, when a gunman tried to enter the ballroom at the Washington Hilton Hotel to assassinate President Trump. 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen may have had his own unique reasons for targeting the president, but he is now part of a long and troubled history of actual and attempted violence against sitting and former chief executives. While the vast majority of these efforts were foiled, the fact that only four presidents have been killed feels somewhat miraculous given the long and growing list of attempted assassinations.
19th century assassination attempts
Andrew Jackson: President Andrew Jackson was targeted by a jobless painter named Richard Lawrence, who waited in the rotunda of the Capitol building and fired two different pistols at him on January 30, 1835. After the first misfired, Lawrence took out the second pistol as the ailing Jackson charged him and hit him with his cane. Lawrence's second pistol also misfired before he was tackled by onlookers.
Abraham Lincoln: Before he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in April 1865, President Abraham Lincoln survived two earlier attempts on his life, the first of which was planned to happen in Baltimore prior to Lincoln's February 1861 inauguration. And then in August of 1864, a bullet from a still-unknown gunman struck and passed through Lincoln's hat as the president was riding to the Soldier's Home outside of Washington, D.C., around 11 p.m.
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20th century assassination attempts
William Howard Taft: President William Howard Taft was in El Paso, Texas, on October 17, 1909, to meet with Mexican President Porfirio Diaz when a gunman named Julius Bergerson was apprehended with a pistol along the procession route, just three feet from Taft and Diaz.
Theodore Roosevelt: On October 14, 1912, a saloon keeper named John Schrank shot former President Theodore Roosevelt — who was running for president again that year — in the chest, breaking one of his ribs.
Herbert Hoover: A plot by Argentinian anarchists to blow up the train carrying President Herbert Hoover through the Andes on November 19th, 1928, was foiled.
FDR: Hoover's successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was repeatedly targeted too. First in Miami before his inauguration, when gunman Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at Roosevelt, hitting Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who later died of his injuries. Soviet officials also claimed to have thwarted a Nazi plot to assassinate FDR, U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Tehran, Iran, between November 28 and December 1, 1943.
Harry Truman: In November 1950, two gunmen — Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo — broke into Blair House, where President Harry Truman spent his second term. Torresola was killed by a Secret Service agent named Leslie Coffelt, who also died in the exchange.
Richard Nixon: In April 1972, a man named Arthur Bremer made two attempts to ambush President Richard Nixon in Ottawa, Canada, but was unable to line up a shot. In May Bremer shot and seriously wounded segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. On February 22, 1974, a depressed father of four named Samuel Byck tried to hijack a DC-9 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport to fly it into the White House and kill Nixon.
Gerald Ford: Shortly after Gerald Ford was sworn in following Nixon's resignation, The Alphabet Bomber, Muharem Kurbegovic, was apprehended a day after threatening to throw a nerve gas bomb at the president. On September 5th, 1975, Lynette Fromme, a disciple of Charles Manson, took out a pistol to shoot Ford at the state Capitol in Sacramento, California. The gun did not fire. 17 days later, FBI informant and Symbionese Liberation Army sympathizer Sara Jane Moore fired at Ford, missing him but wounding a taxi driver.
Jimmy Carter: On May 5, 1979, a man named Raymond Lee Harvey was arrested outside the Civic Center Mall in Los Angeles ten minutes before President Jimmy Carter was set to give a speech. Harvey had a pistol and blank rounds.
Ronald Reagan: On March 30th, 1981, John Hinckley, Jr. fired six shots at President Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton hotel, wounding the president, two Secret Service officers and White House Press Secretary James Brady. Reagan was seriously wounded but survived to make a full recovery.
George H.W. Bush: In April 1993, Kuwaiti authorities arrested 17 men who they alleged were plotting to kill President George H.W. Bush with a truck bomb at the behest of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Bill Clinton: There were four different plots to kill President Bill Clinton, including two masterminded by Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. On November 24, 1996, Clinton's motorcade was rerouted in Manila, after authorities intercepted a threat and discovered a bomb planted underneath a bridge on the planned route. The only shots fired at Clinton, though, were by Francisco Martin Duran, who opened fire on a group of men who he mistakenly believed to include Clinton on the North Lawn of the White House on October 29, 1994. No one was injured.
21st century assassination attempts
George W. Bush: In 2005, Georgian national Vladimir Arutyunian threw a grenade toward the podium where President George W. Bush was speaking in Tblisi, Georgia, on May 10, 2005. The grenade did not explode.
In May 2022, Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab was arrested as part of an FBI sting operation and charged with plotting to kill former President George W. Bush.
Barack Obama: 11 plots or attempts against the life of President Barack Obama, of various degrees of seriousness, were stopped, including in April 2009, when Turkish authorities foiled a plot to kill Obama by a Syrian man posing as an Al-Jazeera journalist. Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, a right-wing extremist, fired 25 rounds of an automatic rifle at the White House in January 2011 in another attempt on Obama's life, breaking a window but wounding no one. Four soldiers connected with a right-wing militia were also arrested by authorities in August 2012 for plotting to kill Obama.
Glendon Scott Crawford and Eric Feight, two white supremacists, were arrested in 2013 for plotting to murder Muslims as well as President Obama with a bespoke radiation device. And in February 2015, three New York City men who claimed affiliation with ISIS were arrested when they told undercover FBI agents that they were planning to kill Obama.
Joe Biden: On May 23rd, 2023, neo-Nazi Sai Varshith Kandula tried to drive a rented truck into the White House to kill President Joe Biden.
Donald Trump: Gregory Lee Leingang made the first of many plots against or attempts on President Donald Trump's life while he was in office. Leingang stole a forklift and drove it to a Trump rally in Mandan, North Dakota on September 6th, 2017, intending to flip the president's limousine. In November 2017, a man associated with the Islamic State was arrested in Manila on suspicion of plotting to assassinate Trump.
On October 3rd, 2018, a Utah Navy veteran named William Clyde Allen III was arrested after mailing a letter laced with ricin to President Trump. In September 2020, a Canadian woman named Pascale Ferrier was arrested while trying to enter the United States and later charged with mailing ricin-laced letters to Trump.
The most serious attempt on any current or former president's life since Hinckley's 1981 shooting of President Reagan unfolded on July 14, 2024. At a campaign rally for his 2024 attempt to win back the White House after losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, President Trump was grazed by a bullet fired by a 20-year-old man named Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks killed a 50-year-old firefighter named Corey Compatore, who was shielding his wife and children from the gunfire, and critically wounded two others. Trump's injuries were not serious.
Crooks had gone from a "meek engineering student critical of political polarization" to a "focused killer" who for months had "operated in secret, using aliases and encrypted networks" while planning the attempt, said The New York Times. "It remains my firm conviction that God alone saved me that day for a righteous purpose: to restore our beloved Republic to greatness and to rescue our Nation from those who seek its ruin," said President Trump in a statement. Crooks was killed by Secret Service snipers, and his motives remain a mystery.
Several other gunmen made significant attempts on Trump's life after the Butler shooting. On September 15, 2024, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh hid in bushes for 12 hours on one of Trump's golf courses in West Palm Beach, Florida, positioning himself within firing range of the then-former president before he was spotted by Secret Service agents and apprehended. Routh, who says he voted for President Trump in 2016, "had spent time in Ukraine where he said he was trying to recruit foreign soldiers, including from Afghanistan, to fight the Russians," said the The Associated Press. Trump's stated opposition during the 2024 campaign to ongoing U.S. support for Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia was likely part of Routh's motive.
On February 22, 2026, 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin snuck past security at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence armed with a shotgun before he was shot and killed by Secret Service agents. And on April 25, 2026, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen ran past a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton Hotel in an effort to reach the ballroom where President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and many members of the president's cabinet were participating in the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. Allen hit one Secret Service agent, who was saved from serious injury by a bulletproof vest. He was quickly subdued and apprehended and did not reach the ballroom, although he succeeded in throwing the event into total chaos. Allen left a note that "that suggests he was angered by the actions of the Trump administration," said The New York Times. Trump administration officials pointed the finger at what they deemed overheated rhetoric from Democrats, while Democrats insisted that equating their criticisms of President Trump and his policies with calls for violence is disingenuous at best.
