Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump gestures as he is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa.
| Photo Credit: AP

 Shots were fired during a rally speech by Donald Trump, in an incident that investigators are treating as a possible assassination attempt on the former President.

Including Abraham Lincoln and JFK, here are some notable examples of shootings involving U.S. Presidents or presidential candidates:

Donald Trump shooting LIVE updates July 14, 2024

Ronald Reagan (1981)

President Reagan was shot and seriously wounded as he left an event at the Hilton hotel in Washington. The attacker was John Hinckley Jr, who was granted unconditional release in 2022.

Reagan spent twelve days in the hospital. The incident boosted Reagan’s popularity, as he displayed humor and resilience during his recovery.

Gerald Ford (1975)

President Ford was left unscathed in two separate assassination attempts by women in September 1975, both in California and within a span of just 17 days.

George Wallace (1972)

While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Wallace was shot four times and paralyzed for life at a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland.

The assassination attempt on Wallace, who was known for his segregationist views and populist appeal, highlighted the ongoing political tensions in the US and potential for domestic violence in the Vietnam war era.

Robert F. Kennedy (1968)

President John F. Kennedy’s brother Robert, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

The assassination had a profound impact on the 1968 presidential race and occurred just two months after the killing of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, adding to the political turmoil of the late 1960s.

John F. Kennedy (1963)

Riding in his motorcade with his wife Jackie, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Warren Commission investigating the assassination concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine who had lived in the Soviet Union, had acted alone.

Many Americans believe the death of JFK began a more violent period in US politics and society, with the Vietnam War build up and the civil rights struggle as a backdrop.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933)

As president-elect, FDR was the target of an assassination attempt in Miami, Florida. He was unharmed, but Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was killed in the attack.

Theodore Roosevelt (1912)

Like Trump, Teddy Roosevelt was running for the White House as a former President when he was shot in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The bullet, which remained lodged in his chest for the rest of his life, was slowed by the folded 50-page speech and steel eyeglass case in his breast pocket.

Famously, Roosevelt decided to deliver his scheduled speech despite being shot.

William McKinley (1901)

President McKinley was shot and killed by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, New York.

Abraham Lincoln (1865)

Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and Confederate sympathizer, while watching a play called “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater in Washington.

Booth’s attack, just days after the Confederate surrender in the Civil War, was part of a larger plot that included attempts to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward.

While Ronald Reagan, left, had pledged to leave office if he became ‘impaired’, President Biden affirmed that he is ‘racing to the end’.
| Photo Credit: AP

The age question for presidential candidates in the U.S. is more than four decades old. President Ronald Reagan in 1980 answered it with a pledge to resign if he became impaired, and in 1984 with a clever joke that reset his campaign from a stumbling debate performance to a 49-State landslide and a second term.

“I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan said to the question he knew was coming in perhaps the most famous mic-drop moment in campaign history. “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

The audience roared, even Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale laughed — and Reagan’s reelection was back on track.

Today, Democratic President Joe Biden, 81, is struggling for such a redemptive moment after a disastrous debate performance against Republican former President Donald Trump, 78. Those 90 minutes last week set off alarms among Democrats hoping Mr. Biden would keep Mr. Trump from returning to the White House — and heightened concern among voters long skeptical of how either elderly man would govern a complex nation of more than 330 million people for four more years.

More than two dozen people who have spent time with the President privately described him as often sharp and focused. But he also has moments, particularly later in the evening, when his thoughts seem jumbled and he trails off mid-sentence or seems confused, they said. Sometimes he doesn’t grasp the finer points of policy details. He occasionally forgets people’s names, stares blankly and moves slowly around the room, they said.

Mr. Biden has vowed to stay in the race, despite signs of eroding support on Capitol Hill.

“I am running … no one’s pushing me out,” Mr. Biden said on a on call Wednesday with staffers from his reelection campaign. “I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win.”

But the question facing him is far more intimate, according to one expert who covered Reagan’s health during his presidency. “The most important debate of the campaign is the one taking place right now in Biden’s head between the part of mind telling him he’s the chosen one, and the more self-aware part,” said Rich Jaroslavsky of the University of California Berkeley, formerly of the Wall Street Journal.

At its heart, the question — how old is too old to be President? — is about competence. And Americans have never had wider personal experience with the effects of aging than they do today.

A surge of retiring baby boomers means that millions more Americans know when they see someone declining. For many, this widespread experience made Mr. Biden’s halting performance during Thursday’s debate a familiar reality check.

Mr. Trump seemed more vigorous, even though he lied about or misstated a long list of facts. When he challenged Mr. Biden to a cognitive test, Mr. Trump flubbed the name of the doctor who had administered his.

“Is this an episode, or is this a condition?” Rep. Nancy Pelosi, 84, wondered on MSNBC, reflecting the question dominating Democratic circles this week. “It’s legitimate — of both candidates.”

Reagan faced the same questions even before he was elected as the oldest President to that point.

That didn’t happen. Reagan served two full terms, leaving office in 1989.

Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Biden has made a similar pledge, and their campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

Brian Mulroney, the former Canadian prime minister who struck a free trade deal with the U.S. but whose legacy was marred by revelations of improper business dealings with an arms dealer, has died.

Mulroney died peacefully surrounded by family, his daughter Caroline Mulroney posted on social media platform X on Thursday, February 29, 2024. He was 84.

Mulroney had a heart procedure in August and was treated for prostate cancer earlier last year, she said in a social media post in late August 2023.

A corporate lawyer turned businessman, Mulroney led the center-right Progressive Conservatives to a historic win in 1984 over the Liberals of Pierre Trudeau.

Justin Trudeau condoles death

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Pierre’s son, shared in a social media post that he was devastated by Mulroney’s death.

“He never stopped working for Canadians, and he always sought to make this country an even better place to call home. I’ll never forget the insights he shared with me over the years – he was generous, tireless, and incredibly passionate,” Mr. Trudeau wrote.

A skilled politician with a gift for public speaking, Mulroney sought to emulate in Canada the conservative leanings of the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher era by revamping the tax system and selling off government assets.

His nine-year stewardship was marked by negotiations for the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988, which helped boost Canadian exports, and the introduction of a goods and services tax in 1991. The tax was enormously unpopular politically but helped fix the government’s finances.

Under Mulroney, some government-run corporations were sold off, including Air Canada.

Mulroney took an active interest in foreign affairs, pushing through a treaty with the United States to curb acid rain, spearheading efforts to tackle the 1984 Ethiopian famine and speaking out against apartheid in South Africa.

“You cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done as many significant things as I did, because there are none,” the author Peter Newman quoted him as saying in an interview.

Mulroney was born on March 20, 1939. He and his wife Mila had four children.

A tall man with a broad smile and booming voice, Mulroney was known for his charm, which University of Toronto history professor Robert Bothwell described as “a unique characteristic that was extremely effective”.

Acid rain treaty

Mulroney formed a close bond with Reagan, the U.S. president at the time, and the two men marked a 1985 summit with a public rendition of the song “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”.

Mulroney’s ties to Reagan helped him negotiate the landmark acid rain treaty and the trade deal with the U.S., by far Canada’s biggest trading partner.

“It’s quite clear that Reagan was prepared to go out of his way to oblige his friend Brian,” Bothwell said in an interview. “I do think that on relations with the United States, he deserves immense credit.”

Mulroney also presided over two failed bids to change Canada’s Constitution to grant the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec the status of a distinct society.

The efforts, designed to thwart the Quebec independence movement, fostered deep cleavages between French and English Canada that reverberated politically for decades.

Mulroney won large majorities in 1984 and 1988, in part by bringing together social conservatives in the west of Canada and nationalist voters in Quebec.

But strains began to emerge and the union fell apart in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the creation of the overtly separatist Bloc Quebecois and the western-based Reform Party.

He resigned in 1993 amid record low popularity numbers. The Progressive Conservative party was reduced to just two of 295 seats in the House of Commons in an election later that year – easily the biggest defeat in Canadian history – and never recovered politically.

After leaving politics, Mulroney returned to law and became a partner with the Montreal firm Norton Rose Fulbright.

In 1995, a leaked letter revealed that Royal Canadian Mounted Police had accused Mulroney of having taken kickbacks from German-Canadian arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber on the sale of Airbus airliners to Air Canada in 1988. Mulroney sued the Liberal government and won an apology and damages in 1997.

But in 2010, an inquiry into the affair concluded Mulroney had indeed had inappropriate business dealings with Schreiber. Mulroney told the inquiry there was nothing illegal about the payments, but apologised publicly for taking the money.

“My second biggest mistake in life, for which I have no one to blame but myself, is having accepted payments in cash from Karlheinz Schreiber,” he said in 2007. “My biggest mistake in life — by far — was ever agreeing to be introduced to Karlheinz Schreiber in the first place.”

A close friend of both Reagan and former U.S. President George H. W. Bush, he delivered eulogies at the funerals of both men.