By Philip Berkwit
The 2024 election cycle has been a spectacle for America. From gunshots to dropouts, the election has been a wildly historic time for the country. On the republican side of the election, Donald Trump has become the first person since Herbert Hoover to run for office after losing his second presidential election. That being said, the only president to ever win a second term inconsecutively was the Democrat, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland served as both the 24th and 26th president from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. Donald Trump is also not the first republican to get shot at while planning a comeback to office. According to The New York Times, “more than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt was shot just before he was scheduled to go onstage at a campaign event — and went ahead to give his speech anyway with a bullet in his chest.” Looking past political parties, the last president to be shot was Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. According to Vox, “The shooter was John Hinckley Jr., who was later found not guilty of attempted murder on account of insanity. He had no political motive: He had become obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster and thought he could impress her by shooting the president.”
However, Reagan was not the last president to have an assassination attempt put on him. Besides those mentioned, in 2005, George W. Bush had to face the threat of a grenade. According to NBC News, “Bush and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili were at a podium protected by the bulletproof barrier at a rally in Tbilisi in May when the grenade landed about 100 feet away. It did not explode, and investigators later said it apparently malfunctioned.” Besides this, there have been multiple other assassination attempts on presidents. According to CNN, “An Idaho man was charged with the attempted assassination of Barack Obama when he fired shots at the White House in 2011. A man was charged with trying to assassinate then-President Bill Clinton in 1994 after shooting at the White House, and a plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in Kuwait was foiled in 1993.”
Donald Trump is also the first presidential candidate to change his vice president pick since the 32nd president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). FDR was the longest serving president of all time. He was president for 12 years and he changed his vice president three times in that time. Ironically, both Trump and FDR’s first vice presidents would end up running against them. According to History.com, “His first vice president, John Nance Garner III, was so fiercely opposed to FDR’s policies and his idea of running for an unprecedented third term that Garner entered the 1940 race to be Democratic nominee for president.” For Trump, Mike Pence was running against him for the republican nomination and was part of the 2024 republican party presidential debate. Pence and Garner both lost, and their predecessors took the nominee.
On the democrat’s side, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on July 21. Biden is the first sitting president since Lyndon B Johnson to drop out of the presidential race for a second term. According to the Washington Post, “Johnson’s decision, known only to immediate family and a few close advisers beforehand, shocked Americans who heard his speech that night. Now, experts say some of the forces at play during that race — Johnson’s concerns about his own health, discontent over his handling of the war and competition from fellow Democrats — mirror pressures surrounding President Biden as allies publicly questioned his fitness to serve another term. On Sunday, he announced that he would end his campaign for reelection.”
With this, Vice President, Kamala Harris took over for Biden as the democratic candidate. If Harris wins, she will become the first female president of the country. She is the second ever woman to be the official democratic presidential candidate, the first being Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election who also ran against Trump.
Harris is also the first vice president since Al Gore in the 2000 election to be an official presidential candidate immediately after their president who they served with as VP.
Graphic by Ryder Navarra
