Historians See Echoes of 1968 in Trump Assassination Attempt

Former President Donald Trump was named the Republican presidential nominee at the party’s convention this week, just days after surviving an assassination attempt at a campaign rally on July 13.

How the assassination attempt affects Trump’s chances of reelection remains to be seen, but it’s not the first time that violence has roiled a major presidential election year. 

In 1968, two beloved figures in U.S. society were assassinated just two months apart: civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968. That was five years after Kennedy’s brother, John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first Catholic president, had been assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. In response, uprisings popped up across major U.S. cities, adding to a general climate of unrest, between worldwide student and labor strikes and demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which was growing increasingly unpopular. Thousands of anti-war protesters descended on Chicago for the August 1968 Democratic National Convention (DNC), railing against the party’s nominee Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who stood by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s moves to escalate the war.

Historians tell TIME that there are some echoes of 1968 in terms of what’s going on in America now versus then, but also some key differences.

The existential crisis that ties 1968 and 2024

Kennedy’s assassination shook up the 1968 presidential race. He was anti-war and one of the few Democratic candidates who was popular among both black voters and white working class voters, says Maurice Isserman, a professor of History at Hamilton College and expert on the 1960s social movements whose latest book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism. His assassination by Sirhan Sirhan, which came so quickly after King was killed, rattled the nation, and came at a time when there were increasing acts of violence on both the right and the left, building occupations, street confrontations.

“You can say that Sirhan Sirhan might very well have changed history by successfully assassinating Robert Kennedy, preventing him from being the Democratic nominee and likely prevailing in the fall,” Isserman argues.

Trump’s assassination attempt will not have the same effect, he argues: “This latest attempt was just that. It was an attempt. It was not successful, and it won't change history.” While the attempt will bolster Trump’s popularity, he says voters should remember that the Republican party has, since 2015, been “building up a climate in which expressions citing violence have become the norm. On Saturday, the chickens came home to roost, as some clearly very disturbed young man, a registered Republican, decided to make his place in history by attempting to assassinate Donald Trump.”

But the existential crisis, the feeling that democracy is under siege, is a similarity between 1968 and 2024. 

“People are feeling like the country is coming apart at the seams. That's exactly how it felt in 1968,” says Barbara A. Perry, a Professor of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-editor of The Presidency: Facing Constitutional Crossroads. In 1968, voters saw the violence in the streets and voted for Richard Nixon because of a sense that he would “bring peace and law and order back to our country.”

Anti-war protests, then and now

As with today, war was a top political issue in 1968. Perry likens the anti-Vietnam war protests to the campus protests sparked by the Israel-Hamas war in 2024. But Lindsay M. Chervinsky, presidential historian and author of the forthcoming Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic, points out that the Gaza and Vietnam demonstrations are on different scales. “The Vietnam War protests were much more all-encompassing in society because there was a draft."

Michael Kazin, a professor of History at Georgetown University and author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party, agrees that the Gaza protests have not divided the Democratic Party as much as the Vietnam War did, arguing, “If it did, you wouldn't have people like Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Ilhan Omar supporting Joe Biden.”

Kazin, who was a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the leftist groups protesting at the Chicago DNC in 1968, says one similarity between the conventions is dissatisfaction with the nominee. And it remains to be seen whether the assassination attempt will persuade undecided voters to pick Trump or Biden. 

In 1968, there was a rise in youth political activism. There were calls for revolution, and leftist groups like the Black Panther party were rising up against the police. According to Chervinsky, “In 1968 there was this question about generational turnover—was it time for a new generation, or were the existing leaders going to continue to lead? There were all of these grassroots movements—civil rights, antiwar movements—and there have been a lot of those similar things in the last several years.

“There's always been partisan division, since there have been political parties. It is, at times, much more strident, and that is something we're seeing now.”

How America has historically gotten through national tumult

So how did America move on from the tumultuous year of 1968? 

Perry says Americans turned to the ballot box. After Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, his successor Ford’s controversial pardon of Nixon, and Carter’s unpopular one-term presidency, Perry thinks Americans found hope again in movie star Ronald Reagan, who was elected President in 1980 and served two terms 1981-1989.

“How do we get that mojo back? It’s Ronald Reagan,” says Perry. “His running for reelection in ‘84 with the ‘It's morning again in America’ ad is positive. If you look at Gallup polls back then, there is a burst upward of Americans’ positive approval about federal government.” 

Other historians argue that we’re still living in 1968. “Many of the conflicts in the ‘60s are still with us, especially cultural ones—abortion, gay rights, feminism, racism,” says Kazin. As Isserman puts it, “We're still very much living in the shadow of the ‘60s.”