Greetings and welcome to Tuesday, April 28, 2026. Today is Workers’ Memorial Day, commemorating workers who have died or been injured due to workplace incidents. It’s also National Blueberry Pie Day, Clean Comedy Day, and School Bus Drivers’ Day.
1789: Fletcher Christian leads a mutiny on HMS Bounty against its captain, William Bligh, in the South Pacific.
1818: Rush-Bagot treaty signed between President James Monroe and Great Britain, demilitarizing the U.S.-Canada border
1928: RCA and GE install three test television sets in homes in Schenectady, N.Y., allowing trials of inventor E.F.W. Alexanderson’s first home television receiver; a poor and unsteady 1.5-square-inch picture broadcast from a radio transmitter.
1940: Glenn Miller records the song “Pennsylvania 6-5000” in New York City; the tune is named after the phone number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan.
1942: Nightly “dim-out” begins along the U.S. East Coast, as a deterrent to German military threats.
1965: Richard Helms replaces Marshall S. Carter as deputy director of CIA, and William F. Raborn Jr. replaces John McCone as the seventh head of CIA.
1969: British progressive rock band King Crimson, with Robert Fripp, Greg Lake & Ian McDonald, debuts.
1989: Iran protests the sale of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.
1994: Aldrich Ames, a former CIA officer, and his wife Rosario plead guilty to spying for the Soviet Union and Russia.
Birthdays today include: James Monroe; Lionel Barrymore, American actor); Oskar Schindler, Austrian businessman and subject of the novel Schindler’s Ark and the film Schindler’s List; Ferruccio Lamborghini, Italian auto-designer; Harper Lee, American author; Carolyn Jones, American actress (The Addams Family); James Baker, American attorney and diplomat; Saddam Hussein; Ann-Margret; Jay Leno; Chuck Leavell, American session and touring keyboardist; Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan; and Jessica Alba, American actress.
If today’s your day, Happy birthday to you.
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With the most recent attempt on the life of President Donald Trump, I decided it was time to break out my tally sheet on such events.
Successful attempts to assassinate a president:
- Abraham Lincoln, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, Republican
- James A. Garfield, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau, Republican
- William McKinley, 1901, Leon Czolgosz, Republican
- John F. Kennedy, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, Democrat
Now, the first three make an obvious point, whereas the last one makes a point with a bit more nuance. Suffice it to say that Kennedy, by today’s standards, would be a conservative, and as I’ve indicated frequently enough, he would want nothing to do with today’s Democrat party.
List of attempts that were not successful.
- Andrew Jackson, 1835, Richard Lawrence, Democratic
- Abraham Lincoln, 1864, Unknown sniper, Republican
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1912, John Schrank, Republican
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933 Giuseppe Zangara, Democrat
- Harry S. Truman,1950, Oscar Collazo & Griselio Torresola, Democrat
- John F. Kennedy1960, Richard Pavlick, Democrat
- Richard Nixon, 1972, Arthur Bremer, Republican
- Richard Nixon, 1974, Samuel Byck, Republican
- Gerald Ford, 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Republican
- Gerald Ford, 1975, Sara Jane Moore, Republican
- Jimmy Carter, 1979, Raymond Harvey & Osvaldo Ortiz, Democrat
- Ronald Reagan, 1981, John Hinckley Jr., Republican
- George H.W. Bush, 1993, Iraqi intelligence (alleged), Republican
- Bill Clinton, 1994, Francisco Martin Duran, Democrat
- Bill Clinton, 1994, Frank Corder, Democratic
- George W. Bush, 2005, Vladimir Arutyunian, Republican
- Barack Obama, 2011, Oscar Ortega-Hernandez, Democrat
- Donald Trump, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks, Republican
- Donald Trump, 2024, Ryan Wesley Routh, Republican
- Donald Trump, 2026, Cole Tomas Allen, Republican
Successful attempts by party:
- Republicans: three of 14 total attempts.
- Democrats: one of eight total attempts.
Notable but non-presidential political assassinations and assassination attempts:
- Huey Long, senator and former governor (D-La.), 1935, Carl Weiss
- Malcolm X, civil rights leader, 1965, Nation of Islam members
- Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader, 1968, James Earl Ray
- Robert F. Kennedy, presidential candidate and senator (D-N.Y.), 1968, Sirhan Sirhan
- George Wallace, governor (D-Ala.) and presidential candidate, 1972, Arthur Bremer
- Vernon Jordan, civil rights leader, 1980, Joseph Paul Franklin
- Edward Kennedy, senator (D-Mass.), 1980
- Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader, 1979-1988
- John Paul Stevens, Supreme Court justice, 1987
- Tom Daschle, senator (D-S.D.), 2001
Before you start on me, I’ll be the first to tell you these lists are far from exhaustive. I’m quite sure some attempts have fallen through the cracks of my less-than-comprehensive filing system.
Anyway, given the time frames involved with those lists, I don’t see a clear political point to draw from them — not when you take them as the whole of our country’s history.
Narrow the time frames a bit, however, and some points become more visible. One thing does stand out about the more recent events: a strong connection to what I’ll call the “contagion effect.” We’re dealing in large part with copycat behavior. Some see it as a path to validation, and no one can honestly deny that in modern times, most of these attempts — successful and not — trace back to the popular media. Copycat attacks were rarer in earlier eras because the media moved more slowly, and fewer outlets existed. The ones that did exist also exercised more self-discipline. They existed in, and felt bound by, a different societal landscape. The ones who stepped outside of that structure tended not to last long.
On that point, I’ll give the floor to Paul Harvey — a man I quote often because I consider him among the greatest wordsmiths in this country’s 250-year history, certainly far more gifted than I am. In his Landon Lecture at Kansas State University in 2003, he said:
And news isn’t just news anymore, it’s around the clock warning. You know, one issue says aspirin’s good for you and aspirin’s bad for you. And now the Food and Drug Administration wants to declare mother — the FDA wants to declare mother’s milk unsafe? The Food and Drug Administration suspects that mother’s milk may be unsafe, but so far nobody has been able to ascertain where to put the warning label.
Let me see if I can help you better understand today’s headlines. For one thing, bad news pays. I’m on a foundation board, the McArthur Foundation, which dispenses large sums for research, and I can tell you that a lot of institutions secure money for research by producing bad news about population, about resources, about environment. For another thing, there’s a demonstrable fascination with, there’s a proved public preference for bad news, because what’s bad news to somebody is good news to many. the listener or the reader of bad news can say to himself, “Well, at least I’m not as bad or as bad off as those fellows,” and then the printer whose printing machine broke down, or the builder who bid too low, or the salesman who lost a sale, or the farmer who lost a crop, or the wildcatter who drilled a duster, he can see his problem is not so bad after all. After all, bad news is good news.
The reader does not want to read about some rich man who’s healthy and happily married. But if the rich man is divorced or diseased or loses his money, that’s more interesting reading, because then the reader can feel himself to be better off. There’s always somebody in any hospital ward just enough worse off to help us feel comparatively fortunate, and noisy news serves that purpose. And thus the plane crash which does not involve you, the billionaire in bankruptcy, the charity boss caught stealing, the movie actor charged with murder, these will continue on Page One as long as the fire which burns them, warms the rest of us.
So goes the sales portion of what we saw last Saturday night. Allen had been watching the propaganda roll by for years and finally felt obligated to take action. Harvey went on from there:
Advertisers in the United States are going to spend $249.3 billion this year —(Remember this is 2003…it’s gone up, since- Eric) and, by the way, that’s 5 percent more than last year — telling us all of the good things, real and imagined, about their respective products. Isn’t it a rotten shame that with noisy, distressing, depressing news hour after hour, day in and day out, by our own emphasis on all of the bad things, crime and inflation and pollution and floods and fires and discords and disaster and discontent, by our persistent preoccupation with negatives, we tend to unsell ourselves and our impressionable offspring on a way of life, which is the envy of the rest of the world. And repetition is effective. Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective.
Bob Barker asked a game show contestant, “For five hundred dollars, name two famous brothers who made it possible for men to fly.” Without a moment’s hesitation the contestant replied “Ernest and Julio.”
The recent attempts on Donald Trump’s life connect directly to the repetition Paul Harvey identifies here. As much as anything else, it’s a knee-jerk reaction. For over a decade, the usual suspects in the news media and across online opinion outlets have hammered the same message: Orange Man Bad.
The same message goes out over and over and over again. Can anyone seriously argue that this relentless harangue bears no responsibility for the violence we witnessed the other night? Consider what this woman says as regards our news media:
Bad as that is, social media has made it even worse. They take what the media says and amplify it. Otherwise, they make up stuff as they go along. Scroll through X, Facebook, TikTok, or Bluesky, and the picture turns bleaker still. Allen was quite active on the left-leaning BlueSky. Every basement dweller with a phone or a computer regurgitates the same leftist catechism — America is evil, Trump is a monster. What we see there is the ultimate in groupthink, and that drumbeat carries consequences.
Anyone who browses those platforms long enough will recognize one unavoidable truth: those pushing the negatives intend exactly the effect they’re producing effects like we saw Saturday night.
Every tinpot dictator in history — Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh, Mao — convinced himself, and millions of others, that he was fighting for the little guy. That he was the moral one. Every assassin on that list believed the same, and so did Cole Allen. Every single one of them was demonstrably, catastrophically wrong — and not one of them, nor their followers, ever admitted it.
The people pushing poisonous chants are simply louder than the ones reminding us that America is the last best hope of freedom on earth. That’s the whole game: volume and repetition. Drown out the truth until it sounds naïve.
Maybe it’s time we got loud about America’s greatness again — and started teaching it like we mean it.
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