Since the moment someone shot Donald Trump last weekend, we’ve been hearing the same thing: this election’s over, and it’s going to Trump. But the course of this race—and American politics more broadly—will probably change less than you think. Tre’vell and Max take a look at past assassination attempts in the U.S. and abroad to explain why surviving violent attacks does not guarantee an election victory. Has any politician successfully leveraged these assaults for political gain? Which US president survived two assassination attempts in one month? How would this have played out if Trump were in office? Listen to this week’s How We Got Here to find out.

TRANSCRIPT

Tre’vell Anderson: So, Max, from the moment we got the news that someone tried to shoot Trump, I feel like my timeline has been filled with the same reaction. 

Max Fisher: Right? It’s over. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yes. It’s over. If Trump wasn’t already headed for victory. He sure is now. 

Max Fisher: And then the photo hit. 

Tre’vell Anderson: The photo. Everyone’s like, this is going to be in our grandkids’ textbook. It’s going to turn Trump into a heroic figure. It’s one image that will change the course of history. 

[clip of Kristen Welker] I think you heard Speaker Johnson reflect on part of it, which is that something has fundamentally been changed in our politics, potentially in our culture and political discourse. But what will that look like? 

Tre’vell Anderson: That was Kristen Welker, the host of Meet the Press on the Today Show, summing up the reaction. 

Max Fisher: But Tre’vell, you’re wondering, is any of this true? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Today we’re gonna find out. 

Max Fisher: We are. And I think the answer is gonna surprise people. [music break] I’m Max Fisher. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And I’m Tre’vell Anderson filling in for Erin Ryan. 

Max Fisher: This is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week’s headlines and tell a story that answers that question. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Our question this week is the failed assassination attempt on Trump going to change the course of this race, or even American politics more broadly? 

Max Fisher: And I know what listeners might be thinking, how could you possibly tell the future? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well, luckily we don’t have to, because like my granny used to say, history can be our teacher. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. So in today’s episode, we have a few stories for you. They are all about previous failed assassination attempts against political candidates. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And of course, no one past example is going to be exactly like today. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: But we can identify certain lessons and trends from how those have all played out. 

Max Fisher: Should we give away the ending here, Tre’vell, and just kind of tell people what we think will happen? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well, I would just say that if you’re worried that this event is going to usher Trump into office or forever change the course of our history, I think today’s show may help put you at ease. 

Max Fisher: Totally. All right, let’s get into it. 

Tre’vell Anderson: We’re going to start with George C. Wallace, the infamous former Alabama governor and hard core segregationist. 

Max Fisher: Wallace, like a lot of southern segregationists, was a Democrat. He ran in the Democratic presidential primary a few different times. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And our story starts in the 1972 Democratic primary. Max, set the scene for us. 

Max Fisher: Okay, so the Democratic primary that year was a crowded field. Nixon had been president for four years. The Vietnam War was on. It all felt very high stakes, and Wallace was considered a credible candidate. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Meaning people thought he could win in other words. 

Max Fisher: They did. Yeah. Wallace won Florida in the primary, plus a bunch of southern states, and he came in second in a lot of the Rust Belt. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And that brings us up to the assassination attempt. 

Max Fisher: Yes. That May, Wallace was holding a campaign rally in Maryland, which was having its primary the next day, and a 21 year old man walked up to Wallace, shot him several times with a revolver. The shooter later said he did it for fame. So not politically motivated. 

Tre’vell Anderson: But our question, the reason we are bringing this up is to ask whether or not this attempt on George Wallace’s life changed anything politically. 

Max Fisher: To get an answer to that, I spoke to an historian named Matthew Dallek. Matthew is a professor at George Washington University, and he is writing a book on, of all things, failed presidential assassination attempts. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Sounds like our guy. 

Max Fisher: Yes. Here’s what he had to say. Just thinking about kind of isolating down to the extent we can, the effect of that failed assassination attempt against George Wallace. As you alluded to, he did win two primaries the very next day in Maryland and Michigan. I’ve seen them referred to as sympathy votes to some extent. Um. But from then on in the primary, he didn’t really do all that well. Um. Texas is the only state that he won in the entire rest of the primaries. So would you say that it’s right to say that the assassination attempt, even beyond that little burst of the sympathy votes in the next day, didn’t really make him a martyr or a hero, and did not really seem to do much good for him in the primary?

Matthew Dallek: I think that’s fair to say. Um. I’m not sure how well he was going to do had there not been an attempt on him. Right? I mean, we’ll never know that, obviously. But, you know, it’s not as if he was poised to I mean, I mean, just given the structure of the Democratic Party where Democratic Party voters were. Um. But yes, he was also in the hospital for months, I believe, after he was attacked, he was paralyzed. He couldn’t really campaign. So that, you know, took him out physically, off the campaign trail. And um, look, I think it certainly he engenders sympathy among some of his supporters, but in terms of electorally and running in the Democratic primary, it did, you know, end his campaign, I think, for all intents and purposes. And it may have I mean, this is more speculation than anything else, but it may have reminded at least some voters of him as a violent figure. Right? I mean, not that of course, you would ever blame him uh for being shot at by this 21 year old gunman. But, you know, violence, really massive resistance to civil rights, the violent, opposition to civil rights from the 1960s. He was, I think, very much associated with that kind of violent resistance. And so, you know, this violence sort of following him around. I think it does kind of etch him in the past in American history as a figure in uh the story of political violence, uh as a whole. 

Max Fisher: So Wallace did stay on the ballot. He won Texas, came in second in a few states. But, his support really did fall away after that. So Tre’vell, what lessons did you take from this for the election going on today? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well, I’m hearing that sympathy right. This idea that people might, you know, change their vote or change their feelings. Right. Based on an assassination attempt only lasts so long. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. It it it isn’t something that, you know, looking at what we’re going through right now with Trump theoretically will last until November, right? Because we we’re out of primary season. We’re not when we don’t have those kind of regular, you know um happenings. Right? That would show us that that’s the first thing that jumps out to me that, you know, is a little reassuring. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. [laughter]

Tre’vell Anderson: You know, based on what I’ve been hearing people say. 

Max Fisher: George Wallace also went on to, I think, as a direct result of this, renounce his segregationist views, which I don’t think that something similar feels like it’s happening with Trump because [?] [laughing]–

Tre’vell Anderson: We can only hope. Right. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. It doesn’t feel like he’s moderating. Something else I thought was really interesting about this story, is that there was a sense in the Nixon White House that who got blamed for the assassination would be really important for the election, to the extent that Nixon even sent his dirty tricksters to try to plant leftwing campaign material in the shooter’s home to try to get him pinned as a left winger, Nixon was really worried that if he was pinned as a right winger, it would be bad for him going into the election and it ended up being that he was just seen as like, you know, a kind of a, like lone, ideologically confused person with no political sympathies. But it’s just to say that it’s an idea that I think we will come back to, that how people perceive the political motivation of the shooter will influence what effect it has on politics. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Absolutely. Okay, let’s move on to our second big story here, former President Gerald Ford and the attempted assassinations. Yes, plural, that he faced during his own presidential primary. 

Max Fisher: Ford, of course, had been hastily appointed vice president in 1973 as part of the Watergate scandal. And then when Nixon resigned in 1974, Ford became president. 

Tre’vell Anderson: So nobody actually voted for him. 

Max Fisher: Right. Which is part of why, in 1975, when he announced that he would run for reelection, he knew that his party was not just going to automatically accept him as the presidential nominee. He would have to run in a real primary. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Against, as it turned out, former California Governor Ronald Reagan. 

Max Fisher: Yeah, it turned out that guy had a political future. Um. A poll of Republicans from this started that, July 1975, had Ford at 41% support and Reagan at 20% support, which is to say that it was Ford’s race to lose, but he was also not exactly beloved. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And that brings us to September 1975 and the two, yes, two assassination attempts on Ford. 

Max Fisher: Here again is Matthew Dallek, the historian, on what happened. 

Matthew Dallek: The first attempt was uh, I believe, in Sacramento and a member of the Charles Manson family, uh who was a mass murderer, quite notorious, a member of that family. She had a handgun and brandished it and kind of pointed it forward and actually was pretty close uh to going off and and could have killed him. I mean, it really was a near miss. On and then 17 days later in San Francisco, Ford was exiting a hotel. And this is 17 days after that first attempt, um a woman, an anti-war radical named Sarah Jane Moore, pulled out uh uh, a handgun and took a shot at him. Although apparently a bystander, a Vietnam vet, saw her gun and and I think, knocked her hand uh away. So it the bullet fired, but it missed, uh missed Ford. And, of course, coming on the heels of the three assassinations in the ’60s, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, you know, the country was still very much, I think, traumatized and the level of violence, too, in the early 70s was was quite high. And Ford, I think, actually acquitted himself quite admirably. You know, he he was very low key about it. He said that he, you know, was going to continue to be president, uh try to kind of roll back, uh some of the trappings of the imperial presidency, you know, sort of a statement in a way, against Richard Nixon and against the abuses of power. Um. Ford said he would still be a man of the people, still kind of go out, uh with the public. There are certain risks in life. Um. But he was willing to accept them, and he was pretty magnanimous, I think, and, and just kind of steady. And yet he also at the same time didn’t necessarily try to reap any political benefits from these attempts. 

Max Fisher: So, like Dallek said, Ford did not really try to politicize the assassination attempt beyond projecting stoicism by saying he wouldn’t let them deter him from campaignig. But Reagan did politicize the attacks. He called them an indictment on soft on crime policies. He blamed Congress and the ACLU. And he said it proved that Ford had gone too far in reining in the intelligence agencies. 

Tre’vell Anderson: But our question is, did any of this matter for the race that he and Reagan were in? 

Max Fisher: Right. Okay. I asked Matthew Dallek this, and he said, there’s really no evidence that it moved the race at all one way or another. Ford did go on to win, but Reagan got 46% of the vote, making his campaign one of the most successful primaries against an incumbent president in history. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And then, of course, Ford lost the presidential election against Jimmy Carter. 

Max Fisher: Right. It turned out those two assassins weren’t the only people who didn’t like him. Um. So Tre’vell, this has me reflecting on how much of the commentary this week says that Trump surviving an assassination attempt is a game changer for the 2024 race? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. And if that’s true, then why, when the same thing happened to Ford, did it amount to a big nothing? 

Max Fisher: Yeah if one failed attempt is supposed to turn Trump into a national martyr. You’d think two attempts on Ford would put his face on Mount Rushmore. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And one of the attempts was by a member of the damn Manson family. It don’t get more dramatic than that. 

Max Fisher: I put this to Matthew Dallek. Here’s what he said. So jumping ahead to Trump and what happened last week, I think my initial reaction to that was to think, wow, this is such an extreme and shocking event that it will surely change the course of this entire race, if not like American political history. But it sounds like maybe past evidence from these earlier cases suggests that it won’t do that. Why is that, do you think?

Matthew Dallek: In more cases than not, I think the subjects of these assassination attempts don’t benefit politically in a sustained way. And in the expected way. Right? One would anticipate, right, that there would be this kind of rally around the president or in this case, former president effect. Um. Even Teddy Roosevelt, right, who was famously uh shot in the chest and continued to speak for more than an hour as he was bleeding, uh in 1912, he was running on a third party ticket, um that had a real impact on his image and how he responded. But, um he didn’t win that election, right? It wasn’t really that close. So there are, I think, limits to these assassination attempts and what happens politically. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well, Max, we have to talk about another much more recent case that is also getting compared to the Trump assassination. 

Max Fisher: Yes. You are talking about my boy Jair Bolsonaro, um the Trump of the tropics, as they call him in Brazil, where he became president in 2019, served four catastrophic years and after losing reelection, tried to do his own very clumsy little January 6th. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. So back in 2018, while Bolsonaro was campaigning for the presidency, he got stabbed. To Bolsonaro supporters, this has become the key moment in his mythology, the thing that supposedly won him the race. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. Even just after the Trump shooting last week, one of Bolsonaro’s sons tweeted something to the effect of, you know, take it from us, Trump surviving an attack means this election is over and he has already won. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And so to find out whether or not that’s right, I spoke to Roberta Braga, who studies Latin American politics and is the director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas. Here’s Roberta. 

Roberta Braga: The first thing that happened was that the voters began to paint the election as a sure thing, saying that he had already won. So following the stabbing, he was glorified and people started to say this election’s over. He’s clearly the winner. And that really set, I think, the agenda for conversation and media coverage. The second thing that happened was that, um people downplayed the attack. Um. And so the opposition really began to make fun of the incident, to portray the incident as having been a set up or orchestrated by Bolsonaro himself for his campaign to get him ahead in the polls and in the voting. The third thing that happened was that the religious rhetoric took off. So there were a lot of posts saying that because he survived the stabbing, he was anointed by God, saved by God, and appointed–

Tre’vell Anderson: Uh oh. 

Roberta Braga: –by God to be the next president of Brazil. Um. And so he was predestined, they said to be president uh, and that’s why he should win. 

Tre’vell Anderson: So some context here is that when the stabbing happened, Bolsonaro was already far ahead in the polls. So that’s part of why his supporters saw the race as effectively over. 

Max Fisher: So Tre’vell, I reported on this election, and I will be honest with you, I have always been kind of skeptical that Bolsonaro getting stabbed affected the race one way or another. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Why is that? 

Max Fisher: Okay, well, if you look at the trajectory of the polls over the course of that race, Bolsonaro had been rising steadily for a while when the stabbing happened, and the stabbing didn’t speed up that rise or slow it down. You can’t see any change in the polls from it at all. And actually, right after the stabbing, Bolsonaro’s main rival saw his poll numbers surge. It looked like Bolsonaro was maybe going to lose until his numbers did recover a few weeks later, amid a corruption scandal involving the left wing party. That I think was probably more important to him winning. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah, I actually asked Roberta about this. Here’s what she said. I want to ask a bit about the point you made that Bolsonaro and his supporters basically suggested that the assassination attempt, that the stabbing was central in getting him elected because it drove support to him. That’s at least what we’re, you know, supposed to believe, right happened. I want to hear from you now that we’re, you know, a few years out from this incident, is that actually what would have happened? Because, you know, we look at the polls and it kind of makes it hard to tell whether or not the the stabbing itself, right, led to, you know, him eventually getting elected or whether there was a variety of other things that could have, you know, contributed to that. 

Roberta Braga: So I would say that it’s really hard to attribute his winning to this singular event. Um. I agree with you. What we saw were a confluence of factors like he was already, receiving really high levels of support. Brazil’s a very polarized country. Um. In this case, in 2018, the very far left and the very far right candidates were competing. And so people were divided already. So I wouldn’t say that this necessarily led to him winning. We can’t say that for sure. Um. But we did see him rise in the polling, uh a bit after the incident. And then what happened was that the polling numbers reaffirmed certain narratives, which then reaffirmed polling numbers. And that cycle kind of continued. Um. And so I think, again, it was kind of an agenda setting thing that happened after the stabbing where people said he’s a lion, he’s a survivor. He’s so brave for having undergone these surgeries after this attack. 

Max Fisher: So Tre’vell. Something else I worry about is that Trump facing this assassination attempt, even if it doesn’t alter the race itself, could bring out his worst, most authoritarian tendencies. Is that something that happened with Bolsonaro, do you think? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Roberto and I talked about that as well. Here’s what she said when I asked what, if anything, the attack changed in Bolsonaro’s politics. 

Roberta Braga: My simple answer to that would it be not much. So I don’t know that the stabbing actually influenced any particular policy that he put out. Um. I do think it influenced a bit how the opposition was talked about and framed. Among his supporters, there was a heavy demonization of the Workers Party and anyone affiliated with the far left in Brazil. That’s something that we’re seeing here in the US already as well. Um. There were claims that at the time, Hadad, who had been the person that kind of took over after Lula was arrested, that Hadad had orchestrated this to get Bolsonaro out of the running. Um. There were also claims about a deep state. That’s again, something that we’re seeing here, um about a global elite, that’s kind of working behind the scenes to determine the outcome of the election. Um. But no, I don’t think I don’t think that it necessarily drove him to put out new policy. It did give him what he needed to paint the left as the enemy a little bit more, and his supporters definitely took that on for him. 

Max Fisher: So, Tre’vell, what do you think? What does this Bolsonaro story tell us about this moment? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well, I think back to what to what Roberta just sad about how the opposition side, right, is able to paint, right, a particular group of people as evil, as responsible. And we’ve seen even in this moment, how the Republicans, right, are blaming the Biden administration and their rhetoric, right, for the shooter attempting to, you know, kill Donald Trump. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Um. And that’s that’s something that that sticks out to me. What about for you? 

Max Fisher: Yeah, I noticed the same thing. It feels like the Bolsonaro stabbing reified what he believed and his supporters believed, which is that, like, he’s invincible. But the deep state is out to get him, and everybody’s conspiring against him. And he has to, like, fight for the people. And what’s kind of striking is that, like, I think to people like us who are outside of that coalition, this might look like. And my initial reaction was like, oh my God, this will accelerate those politics and make them so much worse because it’ll be proof. But the thing is, they really did already believe that. So I think for them it was actually not even a big changer because they were like, all right, we already knew the deep state was trying to kill Bolsonaro, which it wasn’t, but they thought so it kind of didn’t change their politics in a meaningful way. And I think now that we’re a few days out from the Trump assassination attempt. We are actually seeing the kind of the same thing. I really worried this was going to bring out his worst tendencies, his supporters’ worst tendencies, paranoia, conspiracism. But the thing is, is they already believe–

Tre’vell Anderson: They’re already wild. 

Max Fisher: Right. Yeah, right. They already believed they were at war with the deep state and, you know, the Democratic conspiracy. So they were kind of like, okay, well, we’ll continue with the great civil war that we’re fighting. 

Tre’vell Anderson: One of the things that Roberta also said that stuck with me is about the potential globalization right, of this narrative. Take a listen. 

Roberta Braga: One thing that I think is important to talk about is movements are coordinated and they amplify each other’s content and they talk. And so nowadays, misinformation and conspiracy theories are very borderless. They’re very cyclical, especially among Latinos, Portuguese, Spanish speakers who have connections to home. Immediately following the attack on Donald Trump on Saturday, we saw his sons engaging with content from Bolsonaro’s sons, drawing connections between the two instances of violence and reaffirming the narrative that the left had orchestrated this against them. And so I think it’s important to kind of keep an eye on how very polarized sides of the aisle kind of coordinate across borders to reaffirm each other’s values and identities and points of view, because that really can lead to a globalization of the narrative. [music break]

Tre’vell Anderson: Our last story is about Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia, who survived a shooting just this last May. 

Max Fisher: Fico wasn’t running for office when it happened. He was already prime minister. But I wanted to talk about his story, because I think it speaks to how an attempted assassination can affect politics more broadly. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Fico is a very Trumpy figure, right, far right, autocratic, conspiratorial. So it feels applicable. 

Max Fisher: I spoke to Dalibor Rohac about this. Dalibor is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and has written about the lessons for America in Fico’s attempted assassination. So tell us about this assassination attempt from May and what we know about what happened. Who did it? 

Dalibor Rohac: Well, so Slovak Cabinet was having one of their meetings outside of the capital in a in a small town in central Slovakia. After the cabinet meeting, ministers went out to greet the crowd. There was not a massive crowd. It was, you know, a couple of dozen people. And there was this older man, 71 year old, uh Juraj Cintula, who had previously worked as a security guard, who was retired, who had the gun, and he shot the prime minister four or five times. Um. Thankfully, he didn’t really kill him, but but he was in ICU for a number of weeks and is only slowly making a return to the public life now. Um. The, the shooter was, uh somebody who very clearly was very online, uh very preoccupied with politics and seemingly confused. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Now, do we know anything about why this guy tried to kill the Prime Minister? I feel like we are learning, as you mentioned earlier, that how a shooter’s motives are perceived can end up mattering a whole lot for what impact an assassination attempt can have on politics. 

Max Fisher: Totally. Here’s what Dalibor had to say. 

Dalibor Rohac: So his political opinions have been all over the place. He was anti Roma, Slovakia has a sizable Roma population, which is target of sort of casual racism and and all kinds of discrimination. Um. And he was also preoccupied with the um disappearance of civility from politics. It has to be said that Fico himself have been a massive contributor to this crisis of civility and in Slov politics, the sort of rhetoric that kept being ratcheted up. And uh, all of his opponents have been at some point or other accused of being morally suspect on the payroll of the United States and so on and so forth. So, so, so, so this guy was clearly reacting to this heavily polarized atmosphere that exists in Slovakia, which, again, would be very familiar to somebody from the United States. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. I was going to say this also sounds like a very familiar figure. Someone who is personally and individually very ideologically confused and all over the place, but also exists in a context that is extremely polarized and paranoid. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And so now for our big question, did this change anything? Did it make the Prime Minister more popular, less popular, more autocratic, less autocratic? 

Max Fisher: Okay, so that answer, I think, is one of the more worrying takeaways from our episode this week. Here’s Dalibor again. 

Dalibor Rohac: When it happened, I almost immediately assumed that it would have a major transformational effect on Slovak politics. But however, I think in retrospect it looks like it’s accelerated preexisting trends rather than changing the dynamics. So so already before the assassination attempt, Fico was intent on entrenching himself in power in some way or another. And that trend has continued. So the governing coalition has passed legislation, basically ending the public broadcasting status of, of, of Slovakia’s public broadcaster, TV and radio, bring it under political control. Um. They are now, playing with an idea for a law that would require NGOs requiring foreign funding to register as foreign agents. Again, in a move that’s reminiscent of Hungary and Russia and and more recently, Georgia, uh and that has those are kind of package of laws passed in the aftermath of the shooting that restricts right to protest. 

Max Fisher: So Tre’vell, these four stories that we told today, like, what lessons do you take away from them kind of altogether? Like, what do you think history tells us about the likely consequences of this attempt on Trump? 

Tre’vell Anderson: I think history is telling everyone to, you know, wipe their brow and breathe a little easier. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right? But to–

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Also not ignore, right, what we are witnessing and what we are seeing. I think one of the biggest takeaways for me is that in every situation, the assassination attempt just kind of further confirmed people’s thoughts, like they were able to take it and twist it into whatever narrative was, you know, best serving for them. Right. Um. Which I think when we recognize that, right, as voters, as people witnessing that, then it allows us to just navigate what they’re saying to us a little better. 

Max Fisher: Right. Yeah I agree. I think I feel like it’s unlikely this will change the course of the race. Doesn’t seem like it’s changing Trump’s numbers. It doesn’t seem like it is much changing his politics or his supporter’s politics beyond confirming what they already thought was happening. Um. They kind of uh Fico lesson from Slovakia does have me a little worried where he became so much more authoritarian. But I think something important for kind of understanding how to situate that against the United States is this study about the consequences of failed assassinations that has been circulating a little bit this week. It got written up at the Atlantic. It’s called Hit or Miss. [laugh] The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War by the political scientist Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken. And one of the things that it found is that a failed assassination attempt against an autocratic leader does lead them to be more autocratic, more authoritarian. And that’s something that we saw in Slovakia. But in a failed assassination against a democratic leader, does not have any effect on whether or not the country becomes more or less autocratic. So I think that the fact that this happened to Trump when he was out of office, rather than the fact that when he was in office and would have had the tools at his disposal to immediately say, like, okay, we’re–

Tre’vell Anderson: Absolutely. 

Max Fisher: –banning peaceful protests, you might say Tre’vell, we dodged a bullet. [laughter] I know, it’s terrible, I’m so sorry. Thank you for letting me get away with that. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Listen it– 

Max Fisher: It is very generous of you. 

Tre’vell Anderson: There it is. 

Max Fisher: It happened. There’s nothing to be done. Um. There was a poll that came out, a couple days ago where it asked people to say what they think the motivation of the shooter was. Right. I feel like that’s something we’ve learned is really important. If people blamed, like the left or the right for the shooting, that can change politics. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. 

Max Fisher: And the number one answer is that people said deranged shooter. And the number two answer that people had was that the thing that caused the shooting was Trump and his own rhetoric. Distant number three was people blamed Biden and the Democrats. Then after that they blamed political polarization, gun control. Um. So people think that this was kind of a lone person who did not represent anything. And in fact, we have gotten from the reporting that’s come out since that this guy was just googling, like any presidential candidate who was–

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. 

Max Fisher: –going to come to his town. So I think that the narrative that is gelling around this, based on what we know from past attempts, makes me think that this is not the worst case that I initially thought it was going to be. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. Everybody just breathe a little easier, okay. 

Max Fisher: I love that. 

Tre’vell Anderson: I love that for all of us. 

Max Fisher: I do. Yeah, it’s nice to be able to tell people for once like, actually, you know, I don’t know if we can go as far as saying it’s all going to be okay. But this one specific thing. 

Tre’vell Anderson: This one very specific thing is not as bad as you think. 

Max Fisher: That’s right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Okay. 

Max Fisher: Uh. All right, let’s go out on some assassination analysis from one Marjorie Taylor Greene. That’s the How We Got Here assassination analysis lead correspondent who shared a very strange theory of who did this and why. 

[clip of Marjorie Taylor Greene] It’s also pretty interesting. I’ll go ahead and say it. And I really don’t care what people think about me for saying this. Um. You know, here we go. All of a sudden, we’re being told that that Iran has had an assassination plot attempt coming out. Well, yeah. No kidding. They chant Death to America every single day. Is this some sort of surprise, or is this the next country that the um, the deep state wants to bomb uh in reaction to this? 

Tre’vell Anderson: She’s wild. 

Max Fisher: I thought she made some good points. 

Tre’vell Anderson: [laughter] Did you now? Did you now? [music break]

Max Fisher: How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Erin Ryan. 

Erin Ryan: It’s produced by Emma Illick-Frank.

Max Fisher: Evan Sutton mixes and edits the show. 

Erin Ryan: Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landes, and Vasilis Fotopoulos. 

Max Fisher: Production support from Adriene Hill, Leo Duran, Erica Morrison, Raven Yamamoto, and Natalie Bettendorf. 

Erin Ryan: And a special thank you to What a Day’s talented hosts Tre’velll Anderson, Priyanka Aribindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family.