Was Trump’s escape a miracle, or predictable? A historian of assassination sheds light

Many Donald Trump supporters see his escape from an assassination attempt as a divinely ordained miracle, so what does history tell us? I studied more than 260 assassinations going back to the dawn of history for my book Assassins’ Deeds. A History of Assassination from Ancient Egypt to the Present Day (Reaktion Books). 

That told me that successful assassinations by snipers using a rifle at a distance, in other words the method employed against Donald Trump, were extremely rare, accounting for only four out of 266, while more than 90 of the assassinations involved firearms at closer quarters.

Even when firearms replaced stabbing as the favoured means of assassination in the 19^th century, it was generally the handgun at close quarters rather than the sniper’s rifle. Assassination remained predominantly up close and personal.

There were, of course, exceptions. Assuming you accept the official versions of events, and not everyone does, both civil rights leader Martin Luther King in 1968, and President John F Kennedy in 1963 were shot from a distance.

But the other three American presidents who were assassinated, Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1881 and McKinley in 1901 were all killed at close quarters. A sniper had tried to assassinate Lincoln in 1864, but had hit his hat instead.

In 2003, snipers successfully killed the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjić, who had helped to bring down Slobodan Milošević. He was shot as he was going into a government building.

Then in 2010 while Thailand was bitterly divided between the yellow-shirts, largely supported by royalists and the urban middle class, and the red-shirts, whose members were mainly rural workers, the red-shirts’ head of security, Major-General Khattiya Sawasdipol, was killed by a sniper, while he was being interviewed by a reporter. Sawasdipol’s insistence on always wearing his green military uniform among his red-shirted supporters made him an easy target.

Perhaps the identification of 'assassin' with 'sniper' results from the success of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal. In it, perhaps the most famous assassin in fiction plans to shoot President de Gaulle from an upstairs window as he is handing out decorations to war heroes. It is hard to imagine a more meticulously planned attack, but it fails. As the assassin takes aim, the president bows his head to kiss a wounded veteran, and the shot just misses.

A similar thing, of course, happened with Donald Trump, just as it had in a London theatre in 1800. As King George III stood for the national anthem, a mentally disturbed ex-soldier fired at him, but George bowed to the audience and the shot whistled past.

In fact, most assassination attempts fail. Two American researchers examined 289 serious attempts on political leaders across the world between 1875 and 2007, and found that only 59, just over one in five, succeeded.

Assassins’ Deeds 

https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/assassins-deeds