The attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump’s life on July 13 marked the first time in more than 40 years that someone has shot a current or former U.S. president. It is still not clear what motivated the gunman, but his attack comes at—and adds to—a moment of high political tension across the United States.
To understand what this incident means for both the presidential campaign and the future of the United States, Foreign Affairs senior editor Daniel Block spoke on Sunday evening with Robert Lieberman, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. “History reveals that American democracy has always been vulnerable,” Lieberman wrote in a 2020 article in this magazine, which he co-authored with the political scientist Suzanne Mettler. Roiled by the divisive Trump presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd, “the country has never faced a test quite like this,” they wrote. Now, it faces another such test. The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.
Over the past 24 hours, have you been thinking about any particular period or episode in U.S. history?
The thing that I’ve been mulling over is 1968, which was a year of political assassinations, of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, in the middle of a very tumultuous presidential campaign in which an incumbent president was in trouble. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson eventually dropped out leading up to the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago, which was turbulent. Now, again, we have a tumultuous presidential campaign under the specter of political violence.
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