What Motivates a Presidential Assassin?
55:22 Share

And

And let's face it, we were all that kid. So first call your parents to say, I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply.

Rise and shine, fever dreamers. Look alive, my friends. I'm V Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream presented by Betches News. Where we explore the absurdities and oddities of our uniquely American experience. We got a big date today, Sammy. We got a fun one. So I was like, you know, there's a lot going on in the world and there's nothing that brings me greater comfort than...

We love facts. Sammy has agreed to be with us here today to do a special that is like, I don't know what we should even call this. We call this a fever nap. This is not our normal show. This is a different kind of show. It's a REM cycle. It's a REM cycle. It's a REM cycle. It's a reoccurring dream. Right. It's like a memory because it's history. What you just said makes me really happy because as I've been on the book tour for Democracy in Retrograde, you should buy it.

people have asked us, what gives you hope? And I have said at every stop, please don't let this spoil it for you. If you eventually do hear me say this in another capacity, that reality and facts give me hope because I know for a fact that like the majority of Americans are not anti-abortion and they're not anti-LGBTQ rights and they don't want to destroy the climate. And so as much as it appears that,

that, you know, everything's split so 50-50 and so even. That's just within the system, which is designed to be that way. It's not reality amongst people. And history, I think, functions similarly. It's like, this is what has happened. That's why I'm always trying to report the news. Like, I got to know what's going on so I can know what happened.

So today we're going to be talking about, you know, me and Sammy were shook about the assassination attempt this weekend. Like all Americans were, whether you, nobody wants to see that. That's, it's deeply unsettling to the nation and it's just cowardly act and wrong. And another example of gun violence in America. And it kind of made me feel like, man, if it could happen there, it could happen anywhere. And then I was getting down to myself. So I was like, let me look through the history and see what kind of security mishaps there's been in the past.

We know that there's been assassination attempts in the past and what, if any, impact they had on elections, on the public, on the direction of the country. Because, you know, unlike some unnamed senior member of the Democratic Party who secretly told a news outlet that they had, quote, resigned themselves to another Trump presidency, we do not give up here that easily. We do not give up. And I also don't believe that MAGA on MAGA violence equals a win for anyone.

So we're going to take a look back at the history of security mishaps that involved presidents and see if there's anything we can learn from it. What was the consequence of that action? Right. I think this idea that, oh, because there was an assassination attempt and because Ronald Reagan was

had a lot, his favorability bounced different time, different person, different policies. And the, the, the idea that because Donald Trump had someone conduct a mass shooting at his rally, that that automatically will make him win or that it's some foregone conclusion that this is even a good thing for him, him specifically. I think it's,

it's helpful to look at history to dispel those notions and kind of come at those assumptions. All right, we're going to take it back to a cold day in January, January 30th, 1835, when Andrew Jackson was the first president to experience an assassination attempt.

That happened when Richard Lawrence shot at him twice. Lawrence was a house painter who shot at Jackson two times in the East Portico of the Capitol after Jackson was leaving a funeral for his enemy, Representative Warren R. Davis. Imagine you're leaving like an enemy's funeral and you get shot at.

The terrible luck. That would be, yeah. Representative Warren Ransom Davis had originally been a Jackson supporter, but after being elected, switched parties and became a Calhoun nullifier party member, which argued for the ability of individual states to overrule federal laws. Jackson saw this as a great affront to his power, and he was super mad about it. So he got in a big old fight with this now deceased guy. Yeah.

And had to go to his funeral. As he was leaving the funeral, he gets shot by a, quote, flamboyantly dressed madman who thought Jackson owed him money. Oh, my gosh. Now, remember, I don't know, can you imagine? Richard Lawrence. He wouldn't be the last president to owe people money. For real. Richard Lawrence was, remember, a house painter. And there was an awful lot of lead paint in the paint back in the day. So they're thinking maybe the lead paint made him a little cuckoo bananas person.

Or could it just been him? Well, that's what they said. They were like, because they were trying to justify that he wasn't gay, even though he was flamboyantly dressed, that it was like the lead paint made him kooky. And he used to dress like, I don't know. These people will do anything to not admit that they're homosexuals. Anyway, so he pulls out this gun. It misfires. He tries to shoot Jackson again with a second gun. That gun misfires.

Really bad luck. Such bad luck for this guy. Good luck for Jackson. So Jackson then decides that he's going to beat the ever-loving shit out of Lawrence with his walking stick for like a while before the cops jumped in. So Lawrence was found not guilty by reason of insanity and spent the rest of his life in the loony bin. The consequence of this attempt is...

A senator named George Poindexter, who had years before hired Lawrence to paint his house, did not get reelected because everyone thought that he must be in on the plot. And he was literally like, I do not know this man. I just misinformation, misinformation. They're like, no point. You did it. You set this up. Fake news. And Jackson did go on to win reelection two years after the attempt and, you know, terrorize the nation, gaining the moniker Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. So not great on that one.

First of all, I think Donald Trump has said that he really likes Andrew Jackson. He does. He put photos of him in the Oval Office, which was very distasteful. Right. I didn't realize that bloody, bloody Andrew Jackson dated to that. I thought it had to do with the Trail of Tears. I just assumed it was that. Oh, no. It does have to do with that. Yeah. No, it didn't. Bloody, bloody Andrew Jackson has to do with his legacy of being a terrible person and the Trail of Tears.

But he also beats this guy up. But also he beat the shit out of this guy. Well, the guy did try to kill him. He did? Yeah.

Can you imagine though your gun going off twice and then here comes Andrew Jackson with his pompadour to beat the shit out of you with his cane and they let him for a while. That wasn't unnecessary. That wasn't necessary. But he probably would have been pissed if they didn't let him do that. There was a lot of people from the great state of Tennessee and South Carolina beating the shit out of people at the Capitol with canes. You can also look up the Brookings caning where he beat the shit out of Charles Sumter.

That's the famous caning. Yes. Before there was AR-15 pins being worn by Republicans on the House floor, there was a whole bunch of canings. George Poindexter. That sucks. That's how they bonded. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there definitely been way more assassination attempts than most of us, I think, are aware of in the zeitgeist and probably more successful ones as well. I'm guessing most people are aware of Lincoln JFK and the at least the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life. But there have actually been four sitting presidents who have been killed. So we're going to go through them. But there have actually been four sitting presidents who have been killed. And we're going to go through them as well as the biggest consequences that arose from each.

So starting with your most famous one, 1865, Abraham Lincoln is shot by John Wilkes Booth. He shot Lincoln in a theater because he was mad that Lincoln was winning the war. I think he had like already won. And Booth wanted the Southern states to have the right to start their own country where slavery would be a constitutionally protected right.

We should note that the rest of John Wilkes Booth's family did not agree with him. So they were very embarrassed about the fact that he had sullied their name. Yeah, they were all entertainers. They were like the original Kardashians and now he's got to ruin it. Right. They were the Kardashians of their time, the Wilkes Booths. And, uh,

he really screwed up his family's reputation. Not that that was the biggest casualty of the whole thing, but in terms of political consequences, the result was that his vice president, Andrew Johnson becomes the president. This actually ends up

changing the whole way that vice presidents were picked from then on, because from there on out, the, so Johnson was actually not from Lincoln's party. It used to be that the president and the vice president did not have to run on, they did not run on a ticket and they did not have to be from the same party. And you'd have to compromise with a different

Person from a different party.

Johnson was a slave owner and he ultimately only served just the rest of the term out. And then he was beat by union hero Ulysses S. Grant. He,

He prosecuted the KKK, appointed African-Americans and Jewish Americans to prominent federal offices. So he was the start of that. While that took a minute, that was a big win for progress in the end. Well, people thought because Andrew Johnson was going to have to step up in the wake of the death of Lincoln, that that was going to change the party forever. But in fact, folks were like, we don't want you. We don't like this. We don't like this. We want we want somebody who's going to take care of us. Democracy wins.

The next president who was assassinated in office was James A. Garfield in 1881 by

by a guy named Charles Gattow. Chuck Gattow. I'm going to say it like that the whole time. Gattow. We too. Chuck Gattow was a bad student and a crazy-eyed white boy from Illinois who shot Garfield because he felt he was personally responsible for Garfield's win and that Garfield should have appointed him like ambassador to France or something fancy. How old was he? He was like 24. I mean, he was young. And the fact is he really didn't have anything to do with Garfield's win. He just voted for him.

And so when he was like harassing Garfield to make him ambassador of France, Garfield was like, you can get out of here. I have no idea who you are, man. He's like, you know, this guy was a religious extremist member of the Oneida community, which is a utopian religious sect in Oneida, New York.

Oneida community believes that they are perfect and they are free from sin and that genitals have three functions, all of which needed to be respected. You needed to use them to pee, to build community and to bring forth children. This is the guy who assassinated Garfield. What is building community? The guy who associates Garfield has three very specific uses for his penis and he needs everyone to know about them. This is a religious moment for him.

So the cult looked down on masturbation but recognized that the unmet sexual urges of young men could result in violence. So they set up a system where young boys could have sex with postmenopausal women of the sect to ensure that no children were born, but no one masturbated and no violence took place either.

So this guy thinks he is personally responsible for James Garfield's win. The audacity. This is the peak of white male audacity. And also, you believe there are three uses for the genitals and none of the top three are masturbation? Yeah.

No, I mean, come on, man. I feel like violence came to us anyway. And this is the thing with these religious cults of Western New York, especially around this time. And there are many. We could do a whole episode on it. Jamie Loftus has a really great podcast called Ghost Church, which is about spiritualism in Western New York out here in Rochester. Great listen if you're interested in that. But anyway, this guy who shot Garfield was involved in this sect. And of course, if you were worried about what happens to the young girls...

Well, they're for the sect leader. They're not allowed to do anything. So gross, disgusting. And you would think that maybe this guy from this sex cult killed Garfield because he was against the freaky, complicated communal marriage thing that they were trying to do. But in fact, he killed him because Garfield was against the patronage system, which is where lucrative jobs and government are given to loyalists. And Gouteau thought that he should get one of those since he didn't.

He thought it was important that a Republican kill the Republican president to show dissent from within the party. But why would he get this job anyway? He wouldn't have it because he was a loyalist to Garfield. So he thought he should be rewarded like he was delusional. But this is where I thought this one kind of reminded me of, you know, they're talking about how the shooter from the Trump campaign.

assassination attempt was Republican. Why would he try to kill the own leader of his party? Well, this has happened before with this guy, who said that it was actually important to him that a Republican killed the Republican president to show that this was accountability from within the party. And like he was going to purify the party with this sick thought.

Fun fact, gun laws were bad even back then. Goudeau, I've pronounced this man's name so many times, I don't care. Guitiao bought the gun that he used to kill the president like a day before the event, and he paid extra money for an ivory handle on the revolver because he thought it would look better as a museum exhibit after the assassination. This man has, I mean, I'm not a psychologist, but it sounds like he has delusions of grandeur. He

He's thinking it wasn't just him. No, it's not just him. The cop who arrested Gitao was so excited at having arrested the man who had just shot the president that he neglected to take the ivory handled revolver away from Gitao until they arrived at the police station and were like, oops. Oh, wait, you still have the gun. Oh, no. I was so excited. This cop was like, I'm going to be in the newspaper. I'm going to be in the newspaper. And he like left this man armed.

Wow. That is so stupid. Some things never change, right? Just people are deeply flawed.

The consequence of all this is that they hung Gattow and Chester Arthur became president, appointed two Supreme Court justices, kind of did a lot of nothing, though, had kidney disease, left office. And then we elected Grover Cleveland, the former mayor of Buffalo, who used his appointment powers to reduce the number of federal employees, as many departments have become kind of like bloated with political full-time lifers. So we love that.

And he got rid of the spoils system, which was the thing that this guy killed Garfield over anyway, saying that merit-based promotions and appointments should be the reason that someone got or kept a government job. And he had lots of Republicans and Democrats and even third-party folks on his roster, which was a big change. So, I mean, that one turned out that the political –

Leading didn't go extreme and they actually got more progressive and a little bit kinder. Right. Well, the president's legacy continued. Yeah. I mean, this is different because he was the actual president versus the nominee. Okay. We have our second to last president who was killed in office. William McKinley was killed in 1901 by Leon Solgoss. We have yet another insecure white boy. This time he's from Detroit, Michigan.

He technically went by the name Leon F. Solgaz, although he admitted that the F in his name didn't actually stand for anything. He just added it because he thought it made him feel fancier. Dude, if you want to feel fancy, you should have put it in front. F. Leon Solgaz. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that. I hear. Obviously.

He was a Polish glass factory worker who moved as an adult to Cleveland, Ohio to work in a rolling mills factory. And he didn't really love being poor. Does anyone? Yeah. He just... Nope. He had a chip on his shoulder is what we're suggesting. You know, being looked down on. He's like, but I'm a white man. I'm a white man from Michigan. I shouldn't be poor. Right. I'm in a swing state. Give me attention. Don't you know how important this is going to be? Exactly.

So he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about being a poor immigrant Polish and a Polish Catholic, which I'm sure brings him no greater embarrassment that this is the number one thing we're saying about him. So he ended up joining a more extreme Catholic men's only club, they always do, called Knights of the Golden Eagle. And then from there, he found his way into an all-male anarchist club.

He then meets the famous anarchist, Emma Goldman. She turns him on to some weird anarchist literature and her anarchist friends who eventually find him so weird that they issue a warning about him to all members, basically calling him an op, an op, a fed, a spy. So to prove that he was not a fed,

He goes up to Buffalo to where William McKinley was attending the World's Fair. Did you talk about the World's Fair on an episode once? Whatever. I'm sure that I did. Okay. So he buys a gun right before. Off the rack. Yeah, off the rack, Walmart. And four days later, he goes and shoots William McKinley. And-

The crowd, they didn't have Secret Service at this point, so the crowd starts jumping on this guy and beating him up. And unlike bloody, bloody Andrew Jackson, McKinley has a bullet in his stomach and yells, go easy on him, boys. The guy then gets- What a prince. Yeah. So merciful. What a prince. Merciful.

So he gets taken to jail and he's put to death by electrocution. And this was actually one of the first death penalties by electrocution. The person who did it was the inventor of the electric chair, Edwin Davis. And the consequence of this shooting is that Teddy Roosevelt takes office and he becomes a major progressive, a major force for antitrust legislation. Emma Goldman ends up

arrested on suspicion of being part of this. And then the anarchist movement basically blames him for all of their problems and why they didn't take it anywhere. Not just the part, not just because people aren't like in love with anarchy. It's just not a great pitch, but so they blame Leon. He gets a lot of the blame. Poor Leon. Not really though.

Two fun facts about these people. Emma Goldman is from and lived in Rochester, but she didn't want to be associated with Rochester because Susan B. Anthony and like the women's suffragette movement was here and she didn't want to be like lumped in with them. She thought that they were like not that cool. So she pretends that she's from like Detroit, Michigan or something. She like she or Chicago, she would like go there and be like, no, I'm from here. But no, she's from Rochester. She just she wasn't for the girls. Emma Goldman, not for the girls, as it turned out.

People have been trying to disown their hometowns for as long as ever America has been around. Since that's why we how they came here in the first place. Can you imagine being Edwin Davis, the inventor of the electric chair and like the way that you're proving that this works to get your patent is by actually becoming the like executioner because you're the only person who knows how the electric chair works at this point. I mean, this is like dark, weird,

American history that we don't learn enough about, but we're here to bring you. Very creepy. Now, one of the most famous assassinations of a president, of course, is John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald. We've got the grassy knoll, the CIA, the conspiracies, and another white boy with low self-confidence who apparently was the distant cousin of Teddy Roosevelt and Robert E. Lee, who even knows if that's true. These people make up crazy stories about themselves because it's not necessarily even about politics.

It's about demanding to be seen. And like, there's nothing more demanding, I guess, than taking someone's life. And this is where these delusions of grandeur lead these people. Yeah. They want to have an impact. Yeah.

I guess so. But I mean, do something good. Not in a good way. So no, this guy had a bad childhood. We all did. Went to 12 different schools and a child psychologist reported that Lee Harvey Oswald, quote, had a vivid fantasy life turning around the topics of omnipotence and power through which Oswald tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustration. So he was

There were early signs. This kid gets old enough to join the Marines. The Marines don't want him because he was equal parts annoying and easily aggravated and one time shot himself in the elbow. And if there's one thing that the Marines don't tolerate, it's shooting yourself in the elbow. Really? Well, how do you even do that? No.

You don't have discipline and you're not paying attention and you're now a liability to the whole entire battalion. So the Marines were like, thank you so much for trying. No, thanks. So he decides he's going to leave the United States of America, goes to Russia, marries a Russian woman and becomes like a wannabe Soviet. This is all before he kills JFK. He decides that he doesn't really like Soviet life though, because there are no bowling alleys. That is a direct quote. They asked him, why did you leave Russia? And he said there were no bowling alleys.

And he comes back to the United States with his Russian wife and daughter, moves to Dallas, Texas, first is accused of trying to kill General Walker, who was an anti-communist and a member of the John Birch Society. This is where, like, I think we can prove the point that Lee Harvey Oswald's, like,

weren't towards trying to go after one political person or another because this guy was super right-wing and JFK was obviously the embodiment of the democratic, a wide-eyed progressive. So Oswald originally tries to shoot General Walker, who was an anti-communist member of the John Birch Society, which is like the ultra-MAGA of its day. It's super, super right-wing populist movement.

Doesn't succeed in shooting Walker is under like investigation for this finds time to shoot Kennedy and a Dallas cop escapes. The movie theater is originally only arrested for the cops murder. And two days later is indicted on the murder of JFK while being transferred by the Dallas police to go to a different jail.

This nightclub owner, Jack Ruby on live television comes out of nowhere, sticks a stomach, a gun in his stomach and shoots him. So I went through a JFK assassination phase where I was reading all about it. It really is very weird.

And there really are so many unanswered questions. Well, that's why people think it's like, you know, maybe Lee Harvey Oswald just was a, he wanted to be famous as an anti-government freedom fighter. He was like pro Cuba, pro Russia, all that. Couldn't keep a job. He wanted some legacy. And he thought even if he would be in jail, at least he would be famous. Yeah.

but you know, not on Jack Ruby's watch. I have many questions and this is, I think probably, I mean, one of the biggest consequences of this is simply the way that people think about conspiracies, conspiracy theories. This is sort of one of the original conspiracy theories. And then there's, you know, conspiracies are real things. It's a charge you can have in a legal case. Yeah.

But the idea of conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theories, I think, has sort of been used to discredit very valid theories or invest things that one might be investigating. It's like any journalist who's conducting a big investigation into a story is kind of a conspiracy theorist until they're until they have the final product of what they found.

I do think like this is actually one of the biggest social consequences of, of,

the JFK assassination. And I think we're seeing it on steroids during the Donald Trump situation. This is the thing. It's like the exact same situation. They're like, how did that shooter get into that building? Why did they publish the math of where JFK's car was going to go? Did it feel like an inside job? And now they're saying the same things about what happened with Trump. How did he get on that roof? There was no Secret Service or law enforcement in the building, but not on the roof.

when something terrible happens, our brains want an equally terrible or equally big explanation for that

really spooky thing. So, you know, we fill it in and when government and media and institutions don't like give us a fast and fair answer, then we're going to start to try to like figure it out ourself. And that's where it gets very messy. But the consequence of JFK's assassination certainly is distrust in the government and the rise of like everybody being a conspiracy theorist.

But politically, a little different. LBJ was sworn in. He was the vice president. He didn't really want to be the president, and he doesn't want to run for a full term. It's like the first time that an incumbent does not run for a full term. So we get this dude, Hubert Humphrey. He didn't have a chance with that name. With a name like that? He did not have a chance because it sounds too much like Herbert Huber, which was like a bad name.

And not in a cool way. Not in a cool way. Hubert Humphrey. I feel like they stopped naming babies Hubert. Henry Humphrey could have won. They stopped naming babies Hubert after this. They were like, you know what? It's just not going to work out. Yeah. Anyway, so Hubert Humphrey runs against Nixon and George Wallace, who is like a RFK junior level, spoiler, third party candidate who campaigned on states. A serious racist. Yeah.

serious racist. He's a state's rights person. And so Nixon ends up scooping up the centrists as Democrats squabble amongst themselves to see if Hubert Humphrey is good enough. And while George Wallace is out there pulling like 10% of the vote, sound familiar, it's the exact thing that we're dealing with right now. And Nixon gets it. That is a cautionary tale.

So we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we will talk about some of the assassination attempts that haven't been successful and what happened in the aftermath of those incidents. Stay tuned. And we're back. Welcome back to this reoccurring nightmare that we have.

Outside of the major assassination attempts, there have been several too-close-for-comfort attempts in which the candidate thankfully survived. But when they were like, oh my gosh, an assassination attempt, everyone was like, this never happens. And it's like, it actually happens a lot. We're covering only the presidential ones, but I mean, there's a lot. It is unfortunately common. And with the rise of gun violence being normalized in America, I think scarily is...

not getting any less comment. Yeah. Our big ones, MLK Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Medgar Evers is not on here. There are so many. There were against, you know, different officials. It's,

It's not uncommon, but not that this was any less crazy or that political violence is less of a big deal. But I think we want to do this. We want to have this conversation just so that people can understand the way to view this

situation in the context of this election, that it's not so black and white that this happening means that there will be one particular result. So Ronald Reagan was shot while in office in 1981 by weirdo white boy John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to

to kill the president to get the attention of a then 12-year-old Jodie Foster. He had nothing to do with politics. It had all to do with him being a weirdo who was sick in the head and who was trying to impress a child actress.

by just making himself famous because these people like it is it is an irrational insane act to do something like this and so their thing wasn't like oh I'm going to shoot the president for political gain it was I'm going to shoot the president because I'll get famous and Jodie Foster's famous and then we'll be famous together and no gross

I think that even if someone does have a political motive, there's nothing totally sane in my view about someone who takes that political viewpoint and then enacts a shooting of that person they don't like. Anyone who commits violence like that, there's something wrong. So the idea that it'll win the favor of Jodie Foster is another level, but

Even if you think that this will solve the political issue, that's also bizarre. The next president we're going to talk about who survived an attempted assassination is the one that they're sort of comparing Trump to some people who are super mager trying to compare him to. And that is Teddy Roosevelt, who was shot while giving a speech, except Teddy Roosevelt finished that speech. Not that I think Trump should have finished his speech at all. I think we're in different times, but I think this is a very interesting story. So,

Theodore Roosevelt was shot in 1912 by John Schrank, who was a German-American bar owner who had hallucinations and claimed that the ghost of assassinated U.S. President William McKinley had pulled him.

What? Guys. He was a Catholic. He was a Catholic.

He wasn't a priest. Schrenk was a Catholic, which means that he was governed by the Ten Commandments, which you can now find in all Louisiana schools. But justified- In a readable font. In a readable font, he justified that violating the commandment, thou shall not kill, was okay because he was being used as an instrument of God to stop Roosevelt. So-

He borrowed some money. He bought a gun. He followed Roosevelt around for 24 days. Who has this kind of PTO and cash? This guy did. Yeah. Eventually, he's like, where'd you get the time? That's a long time. Right. Eventually, he decides after... How did he get a car? No, he didn't have a car. We did this all by train. He literally followed the presidential election train-a-cade because there was no motorcade all around. He was in Baltimore. He was all around. And then he finally...

gets drunk with a bunch of musicians at a saloon near the site where Roosevelt was giving a speech. He stumbles over there, shoots him. Roosevelt hits the ground, gets up. Schrenk fires again. Schrenk is then wrestled to the ground by the crowd because again, no secret service. The crowd wants to see this man lynched right then and there. And Teddy Roosevelt goes, no, no. The man shot at me twice. He didn't even hurt me. It takes more than that to take down a bull moose.

In the most badass, cool fashion I could ever imagine. He's wearing like a waistcoat. And he's like, no, no, no. Everybody chill. Look. Undoes his waistcoat. Shows where he's been shot in the chest. He's bleeding out. He's like bleeding. He's like, it's just this. It's totally okay. Finishes his speech. Speaks for 50 minutes to this crowd who is holding Shrank, remember, down at this point.

Then gets medical attention, had a broken rib. He spoke with a broken rib the whole time. Now that is frigging cool. People think the picture of Trump evading secret service and like fist pumping with the flag was cool. That was a Hitler salute.

Yeah. Teddy Roosevelt doing like a full bare chest bleed out thing with a broken rib and still speaking. That was that was pretty cool. Me thinks their bullets were not as dangerous as they are now. They were not. Well, it also hit a button. The first one hit a button. The second one hit his rib and shattered. That should kill you. So it didn't go through. It should kill you. It didn't. It broke his rib. And so that's part of why he didn't die. But

Wait, but can you imagine being one of the guys who drank, the musicians who drank with him at the saloon? They're like, we were just with that guy. They were like, we were just shit posting with him. We were just fucking with him. We didn't think he was going to do it. This weirdo guy who of his own admission has no friends was buying us drinks and was like, I'm going to shoot the president. We were like, yeah, okay, do it. I dare you. Bet. No cap. So here, so there's that. But this is like, I think the best example of if you come for the king, you best not miss attitude because Teddy Roosevelt was like unfazed.

And that made him look literally bulletproof. So the consequence here was that they locked up Schrenk for being, quote, criminally insane. He saw no visitors and got no mail in his 31 years of incarceration, which I think he probably was happy with that. He said he liked having no friends. Yeah, he dies in the asylum and the asylum gave his body to a med school to do whatever they do with bodies.

Teddy did try to campaign for a third term. He and Taft split the vote and Woodrow Wilson eventually won and Teddy became a Supreme Court justice instead. Third party split the votes is the lesson here. Don't try to shoot the president during a speech. Second lesson. And third, Teddy Roosevelt was pretty cool. I mean, can you imagine this bear of a man?

I mean, I really just want to know more about the bullets because I don't think any bullet from today, you couldn't do that with any bullet. The power of the guns is so much better now. Yeah, it's so much more. I know, I didn't mean that. Deadlier. Deadlier.

Okay, let's go to our most relevant one at this moment, Donald Trump, who was shot at by Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old who was relentlessly bullied for his hygiene and general weirdness. His parents were on a list of extremely likely gun owner Trump supporters, even though they were both behavioral therapists and they were reportedly libertarians. We're still learning more here about him. The FBI has not been able to find a motive yet from looking into his phone or computer.

But as you've heard from history, sadly in the U.S., we have a long history of attempted political assassinations done by weirdo white boys who want attention. Sometimes they're politically motivated and some are just motivated by that person's psychology or entitlement or delusions or demand to be seen. So an assassination attempt is horrific and really shocking to all of us, but it does not guarantee a political win necessarily.

for that person as far as we know from history. And now, as we're also learning more about the security situation from Saturday,

There was actually an Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump that was unrelated to this, according to the FBI. And it had been signaled for a few weeks that and what they wanted to do was get back at Trump for his ordering the strike that killed General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. If you remember that they had not they were not done with that. So interestingly enough, Donald Trump's security was actually heightened when this happened or was supposed to have been heightened.

And yet we still have that rooftop that was not secured, that they say was supposed to be secured by local law enforcement. You would think that they would maybe be extra careful knowing about this. So-

We will obviously continue to keep you updated on that as we learn more. We have so many videos of people now that are obviously shouting at the police and pointing this man out for more than a couple of minutes. At first it seemed like, oh, maybe they only discovered him for a couple of minutes. There's like good five, six minute videos on TikTok where people are shouting and pointing at the guy. And I think this is, you know, what is leading to more and more conspiracies is like,

Whoever the authority figure is that's supposed to be giving it to us straight, either they're not watching TikTok and getting the firsthand information that we're all getting, or there's something fishy. There's something weird about it. Why were the cops so unwilling to listen to the crowd? Right. And it's weird because they also still have not, you know, come out with any medical information, you know, the sort of information that they usually do brief you on. So there's a few, you know, there's a bunch of questions around that. And

We still are in the early stages. And like we said, these things kind of, you learn information slowly over time. So we don't want to spread speculation necessarily. But this is not Donald Trump's first success.

security mishap. No, Trump has had several run-ins with security and you might not have ever even heard of these. He is a person who understands that a lot of his power comes from the crowd. So he doesn't want like a celebrity does or like a meet and greet at VidCon, I guess. He doesn't want a ton of like people between him and the crowd because he wants it to make it seem like he's on their side, like he's accessible, like he's not afraid. He's, you know, come to the altar, my childrens.

And so he has sort of eschewed security protocols in the past. And here are just a couple of the bigger examples. On June 18th of 2016, Trump was giving a speech at the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, as part of his presidential campaign the first time. During the speech, Michael Stephen Sanford, a 20-year-old British man, attempted to grab the pistol of a local police officer, saying that he wanted to kill Trump.

This kid was sentenced to a year in U.S. prison. He only served about half of that time, though, before he was extradited to the U.K. His mother said that he had been frequently put on suicide watch while in prison and claimed that Trump supporting guards and inmates had been making his life a misery.

They haven't heard anything from this guy since, but they literally moved him out of prison early and extradited him because they were afraid Trump supporters would kill him in jail. And it turned out that this kid did have really severe psychological issues and just hallucinations and whatnot. In a lucid moment, I suppose, said he didn't actually want to kill Trump. He was just letting the intrusive thoughts come out.

I don't know. So anyway, he's been in the UK and we've heard nothing from him. On November 5th, 2016, three days before the presidential election, Trump was speaking at a rally in Reno, Nevada, when a man in the crowd holding a Republicans against Trump sign was tackled to the ground after being falsely accused of having a gun.

Trump saw that sign from stage, accused that guy of being a Democratic plant. The man's name was Austin Kreitz. And this guy went on to be the victim of the Fox News treatment where they alleged that he had a gun. He was a would-be assassin. They lied on him and said that he had voted in his dead grandmother's name and just a host of other lies about this guy. Fox ended up having to apologize to this man and retract the stories months later, but it did not stop the damage of

Trump at that time claiming that he was the victim of an assassination attempt when there was no gun and it was just a guy in the crowd trolling him. Yeah, you know, Fox News is lucky that he is in an election booth company with a lot of money to sue him. I know. To sue them because that, I mean, I didn't even know about this, I don't think, or if I did, I very much forgot about it. But this is why people were so skeptical when this first happened, because he has already claimed that

This was happening when it wasn't. And he's best friends with Vince McMahon. And that, of course, like all the WWE fans were doing edits saying that this was fake, which I think is like kind of a sick, sad reaction to a very serious situation. But it's America. And that's what we do. We cope with dark humor. The next Trump security breach was on September 6th, 2017 in Mandan, North Dakota.

Gregory Lee Langang stole a forklift from an oil refinery and attempted to drive it towards the presidential motorcade while Trump was visiting to rally public support. This man was arrested and cut a deal with Trump's own DOJ.

Lang gang telling the judge that he was diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar disorder and he had been off his medication since he was 12 years old. He was like 30 some when he did this attack and that he was having a psychotic break that led him to steal the forklift, try to drive it into the motorcade. Also some point during this time, he set fire to a mechanic shop and a state parole office.

I mean, this is- Never heard of that one. Never heard of that one before. You know what I'm getting is the lesson. Americans should not have such access to violent weapons. Or forklifts. Or forklifts, but- Like, was he even forklift certified? I doubt it. Highly doubt it. How did he even know how to turn it on? I know.

There are two more attempts, less silly ones. In 2018, a former Navy vet mailed a toxic powder to Trump. And in 2020, a Canadian woman mailed a toxic powder to Trump, calling Trump an ugly tyrant clown. Rarely got a woman breaking this glass ceiling. Rarely. She's from Canada. She's from Canada. There's so much more. There's so much more progressive than us. There's so much further ahead with their equity.

And then in October of 2020, it was reported that Barry Croft Jr., a Delaware man who was arrested for his involvement in the kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, had included Trump in a list of politicians that he wanted to hang. In December of 2022, Croft was sentenced to 19 years in prison. I also did not really hear that. I heard about the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plan, but I did not realize that they also wanted to hang Trump. Again, it's these things where it's like,

It's not necessarily right versus left. It's honestly kind of rarely right versus left. It's like crazy versus the world or, you know, these lone wolf, insecure white boys who want attention versus anyone with power. It's not rational because the idea of getting your way politically by killing someone is also not rational. So then, of course, there's the one from Saturday, which is the only one that's technically being categorized as an assassination attempt. Right.

And really just to answer the question of whether or not this is going to affect the election, we have a quote from a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Penn State University who says, while it has been an event that has shaken up the nation, it's not likely to have a great impact on either the outcome of the election or the U.S. economy. She brings the evidence that both the NASDAQ and Dow Jones continue to rise Monday as they have over the last few weeks.

And that that tells you that people recognize this is not an event that's going to have a lasting impact on the political or economic well-being of the nation. At best, an event like this temporary derails focus from key issues. But ideally, it does not impact the ultimate outcome. I mean, surely, ideally. I know. So, I mean...

While these events may lead to some additional support for former President Trump, like my two neighbors putting up small little Trump 2024 signs on their lawn, which really shook me. I was walking the dogs and I'd call Natalie outside. I'm like, babe, there's two Trump signs on the lawn. Maybe they liked them the whole time, though. They just got the signs out. No, we think it's because we have an agreement in the neighborhood that nobody puts up any signs. Everybody tries to make it nice.

Because it's a nice place to live. Also, you know, everybody's got nice grass and everything. I live in like a nice little suburb in Rochester. You know, city of good neighbors. We're trying to be nice. But this year somebody put up a progress pride flag and the two Trump signs are directly across the street from that progress pride flag. Sign wars. You never would have thought. We got suburb wards out here.

This is how suburbanites fight their battles with signs. Yeah, they have little, it's the smallest sign too. It's not even a huge long sign. It's a little tiny one that just says Trump 2024. I guess they didn't have time to advance to it or they don't care. But anyway, that's all I've seen in terms of like support for Trump is like a couple people coming out being like,

you know, I was really affected by this or wanting it to be a moment where people would turn and support the president and trying to be like, don't you want to support Trump now that he's been shot? It's like, no, not really. No. What do I look like? The CEO of Sticker Mule? No, not me. That's like not a reason to vote for somebody. No. And I mean, so this idea that what happened on Saturday is guaranteeing him a win is quite simply not true.

If you look at what happened after 9-11, Bush had a 91% approval rating. Trump's has not changed. The shooting, I think, also may have benefited the Democrats a little bit more than the Republicans, if you will, because it took the attention away from the intense scrutiny of President Biden and all that fighting over should he leave the ticket until, of course, Adam Schiff comes out and says, I think you should leave, which...

Did you see Nancy Pelosi hiding behind a skirt? Yeah. He doesn't move without her. So, I mean, last week we were ready to send president Biden out to pasture and now he's been able to show great strength and stability in a time when we could have descended into madness and chaos. I think the results of all of this may just be that it helped both candidates, but in different ways with the possible overall effect being just nothing. It's a nothing burger. It's up to us to decide how we react.

to something as egregious as political violence. I mean, Rolling Stone published a headline that basically said, Trump tries to capitalize on a bullet graze by bullying Democrats into not talking about his fascist policies in Project 2025. And I think, you know, that's probably the biggest truth of what happened here. Yeah, to your point about, it will help the base double down because they feel badly. And like, you don't have to want to see someone dead to think that they shouldn't be the president. No.

And I think people are smarter than like, oh, we need to give him some sympathy vote. Whether this changes things...

will be one factor among many that determine the outcome of the election. And to think like this is some magic bullet, no pun intended, or something that will guarantee him a victory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that we do not want to actualize. We don't submit to autocrats. And also I think we have the benefit of the RNC being these last few days

And we were promised that he was going to be a unity person and he had ripped up his speech and he's saying something else. He hasn't said anything, but they sent Marjorie Taylor green out there to blame the Democrats, the media and do all her inflammatory rhetoric. And like, you know, the people in Florida that are friends with my parents, uh, were like, Hey,

Could you tell her not to do that? We thought that was kind of ugly. And they've never said stuff like that before. I think it makes people who are like MAGA light, like traditional Republican, like a Florida MAGA, like for fun, like because they like go into the tailgates or something. It makes them feel ugly because a man did die in that audience and another man is in critical condition. And while the former president survived, we are grateful for that. A guy lost his life and it's ugly and it's very icky. So we don't need to be like,

screaming and shouting and trying to get people like, oh, it's your fault. It's a Democrat's fault. It's not a partisan thing. If anything, it's a moment to take pause and go, we've gone too far. We've gone too far. Right. Especially because

I think broadly, no one sees Joe Biden as the one who's stirring up the violence. That's the way that this has potentially benefited him, whereas it might not have benefited the Democrats if he was not the nominee at this time, because people don't perceive him as this extremist who is responsible for this violence.

So we'll see where this takes us. And we will be back on Tuesday for our next episode. But we will be on TikTok Live tonight, 8 p.m. ET, reading more of Project 2025. So check it out. Let us know what you think. Please join us. And yeah, I think that is us. That's us. Let us know if you want us to do any kooky history, hot takes in the future on other topics, maybe something a little different.

I don't know. Maybe we'll do the history of masturbation. It seems like it's really driven a lot of political policy. I don't know. I feel like it started like the, you know, the history, the beginning. We'll start. Well, at the beginning, there was this and people were mad and now we all suffer for it until next time. I'm Vita Spear. I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream.

American Fever Dream is produced and edited by Samantha Gatzik. Social media by Candice Monega and Bridget Schwartz. Be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Betches News and follow me, Sammy Sage at Sammy and V at Under the Desk News. And of course, send us your emails to AmericanFeverDream at Betches.com.