They are more common than the public and elected officials would like to believe, according to one presidential historian. In an op-ed in the New York Times, George Washington University professor Matthew Dallek argued that presidential assassination attempts are “endemic to the political culture” of the country. 

“This tradition contradicts a kind of mythic faith, held widely by Americans, in a political system that shuns the bullet and embraces the ballot,” Dallek wrote. 

The turmoil and unrest precipitated by jarring, brutal events rarely bode well for political stability and, in turn, the markets. In fact, political violence and volatility are often considered a drag on the economy because they create uncertainty—which investors detest. Investors and business leaders want predictable economic environments so they know what to plan for as they steer their companies or invest their money. Even if there’s a downturn, they’d rather see it coming than be caught off guard.  

Political violence can also portend a breakdown in the rule of law, which is critically important to keeping all manner of unsavory business practices like corruption, bribery, and theft to a minimum. 

“Stability and rule of law, that’s how businesses function,” Linkedin cofounder and major Democratic party donor Reid Hoffman said in a CNBC interview last week. 

In an interview with Fortune, Dallek estimated 12 presidents in the 248-year history of the U.S., or about one quarter, have either been killed or nearly killed by an assassination attempt. Prior to Saturday’s shooting the most recent assassination attempt had been against a newly elected Ronald Reagan in 1981. Other presidents in history have also been the victims of unsuccessful attempts on their life. Gerald Ford, Harry Truman, both Roosevelts Theodore and Franklin D., Andrew Jackson, and Herbert Hoover all survived efforts to kill them. (Hoover’s was outside of the U.S. during a visit to Argentina where activists’ plan to blow up the train he was riding in was stopped by law enforcement). A further four presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy—were killed while in office. 

A ‘string of politically violent moments’ 

The markets, which were already pricing in a Trump victory, saw the sympathy the assassination attempt would engender as a further electoral boost for the former president. 

When they opened on Monday for the first time since the shooting, they reacted accordingly. There was a rally in securities and assets, like Bitcoin, guns and ammo stocks, and the dollar, which are all expected to perform better under a second Trump presidency. The entire market soared as well, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 700 points on Tuesday, setting a record high. Dallek says it’s hard to draw a direct correlation from the assassination attempt to economic outcomes, but the assassination attempt could dampen the economy if it’s seen as a precursor to more unrest. 

If “it is another chapter in this string of politically violent moments, it can have an indirect destabilizing effect on the economy to the extent that people are worried about chaos in the streets, they’re worried about more violence,” Dallek said. 

According to the FBI, since the attack on Trump violent political rhetoric was “ticking up.” Even before Saturday, there was research indicating that the past few years have been characterized by heightened levels of the possibility of politically motivated violence. Starting in 2017, the year Trump was inaugurated, there were 13 federal charges of ideologically motivated threats against public officials, according to data from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. By the time he left office in 2021, that number had more than doubled to 31.  

The fact assassination attempts are relatively common in U.S. history, doesn’t diminish their significance, according to Dallek. “It’s not necessarily a normative judgment about them, it’s a historical reality,” he said. 

‘Grappling’ with the ‘origins’ of presidential assassinations 

Acknowledging their frequency is crucial to ensuring assassination attempts don’t escalate into further political violence. “In order to address a problem, I think the country has got to grapple with its origins,” Dallek said. 

Dallek argued that in the U.S. the problem of assassination attempts stems from three factors unique to America: easy access to guns, the prevalence of conspiracy theories, and America’s libertarian streak that makes certain individuals suspicious of the government. 

Gun control is a heavily debated topic that regularly resurfaces in the aftermath of mass shootings or other such violent crimes. Trump’s shooting was no exception, although discussions were much more muted this time around. Their prevalence is also a distinctly American cultural phenomenon with one 2018 report finding that the U.S. had 120 guns for every 100 people. Another study found just under one third of U.S. adults owned a gun, according to a 2023 Pew Research survey. 

Conspiracy theories are also widespread, said Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political science professor and author of Radical American Partisanship, a book on political divisions in the U.S., pointing to age-old examples like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. “The problem is when those conspiracy theories infect our political structure,” she said. 

Conspiracy theories can even influence extremists who act alone, according to Chapman University sociology professor Pete Simi, who studies political extremism and violence. “Especially now with digital technology, social media, and online cultures it’s so easy for an individual to remain on their own, but still be immersed in a broader environment that can be quite encouraging and promoting of violence,” he said. 

Many such conspiracy theories include a distrust of the government, which has long been a feature of American politics. In recent years, trust in the government plunged to its lowest levels in decades, according to Pew Research. Even a slight uptick in trust levels in 2024 meant that a paltry 21% of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing “most of the time.” Just 2% trusted it to do the right thing “just about always.” 

Authorities have yet to determine a motive for the assassination attempt against Trump, so it is still too early to tell if Dallek’s framework would apply in this case. Meaning, it is also entirely possible that Saturday’s shooting was not politically motivated as was the case when John Hinkley Jr. shot Reagan in 1981 or when Charles Guiteau killed Garfield. Hinkley Jr. was a mentally unstable individual who shot Reagan in an attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster. Guiteau, also unstable, killed Garfield because he believed he was owed a European consulship.  

Even without a clear-cut motive the attempt on Trump’s life opens the door for more political strife that if left unchecked could spill over into the economy. “Violence begets violence,” Dallek says, “And more violence tends not to be a great economic generator, at least for most Americans.”

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

In a leaked phone call with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former President Donald Trump incorrectly suggested that childhood vaccine doses are too large and are dangerous to kids.

Referring to a “massive” vaccine “that is like 38 different vaccines” and “looks like it’s meant for a horse” rather than a baby, Trump claimed in a video clip of the call that was shared online to have seen “too many times” vaccinated children “all of a sudden starting to change radically.”

Although Trump didn’t specify the “sudden” changes, the former president is likely referring to the long-debunked notion that vaccines cause autism, a falsehood he has previously shared. Furthermore, no childhood vaccine or combination of vaccines targets 38 diseases at once. There’s no evidence that the current vaccination schedule is harmful to children.

Trump’s false claims about vaccines immediately preceded an apparent offer to work in some way with Kennedy, who is well known for his anti-vaccine views. Trump also discussed aspects of the attempt on his life at a campaign rally on July 13.

Neither presidential campaign responded to requests for comment and clarification.

The Leaked Call

The video clip of the phone call, which runs under two minutes and shows Kennedy speaking to Trump over speakerphone, was first shared by Kennedy’s son Robert “Bobby” Kennedy III, on X, the Washington Post reported. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, the wife of Bobby Kennedy III, is Kennedy’s campaign manager.

According to a screenshot of his original post, Bobby Kennedy III shared the clip of the call, which he said occurred on July 14, because he was upset that Trump had chosen Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate over his father. “He could have picked a unity ticket instead he picked JD ‘fire all the unvaccinated nurses’ Vance,” he wrote, alluding to a 2022 tweet from Vance about overwhelmed hospitals that included the line, “let’s fire thousands of nurses who refuse to get the vaccine.”

Bobby Kennedy III, however, seems to have misunderstood that Vance, who has a record of opposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, was being sarcastic in the tweet. Bobby Kennedy III subsequently removed his post with the video “for mistaking sarcasm for real life,” he said on X. But the video had already spread online and remains available on news sites, including NBC News and CNN.

On July 16, when the clip went viral, Robert F. Kennedy issued an apology. “When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer,” he wrote on X. “I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”

“I agree with you, man. Something’s wrong with that whole system,” Trump said at the beginning of the video, presumably referring to vaccination. “Remember, I said you want to do small doses. Small doses.”

“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby. It looks like you should be giving a horse this … And did you ever see the size of it, right? You know, it’s this massive,” Trump continued, trailing off. “And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.”

“Yeah,” Kennedy replied.

Trump then appeared to want to collaborate with Kennedy in some capacity. “Anyway … I would love you to do something,” he said. “And I think it would be so good for you. And so big for you. And we’re going to win. We’re going to win. We’re way ahead of the guy.”

Trump proceeded to recount how Biden had called him after the assassination attempt, saying the bullet that grazed him sounded like “the world’s largest mosquito.” The video abruptly ends with Trump commenting on the type of weapon used to shoot him — “an AR-15 or something,” he said, adding, “pretty tough guns, right?”

Throughout the clip of the call, Kennedy was largely silent, only occasionally responding.

Trump’s Vaccine Falsehoods

Trump’s comments in the leaked call are similar to his previous false statements about vaccines. 

For example, in a 2015 Republican primary debate, he recounted an anecdote about a toddler who was vaccinated, developed a fever and went on to develop autism. During that debate, he also advocated “smaller doses over a longer period of time” and used his favored equine language to describe vaccines. 

“I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child, and we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me,” he said.

Earlier in the decade, he also was preoccupied with vaccine dose sizes or combinations.

“Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism,” he falsely declared in a 2012 tweet. 

Two years later, he insisted in a tweet that he wasn’t against “vaccinations for your children,” but was against vaccinations “in 1 massive dose.” “Spread them out over a period of time & autism will drop!” he added.

There has been intense scientific investigation into the issue, and there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism. In fact, a significant body of work refutes the idea — first proposed by a now-retracted and fraudulent study — with study after study failing to find a link. The rise in autism cases in the last several decades is in large part thought to be due to awareness of the condition and changes in how it is defined.

Similarly, there is no evidence that the current vaccine dose sizes or combination vaccines are hazardous to children or that additional “spacing out” of vaccines is needed. As with all medical products, vaccines are not 100% safe, but serious side effects are rare. Deviating from the immunization schedule is risky because children go unprotected and can contract diseases before they are vaccinated.

Children, of course, do not receive all their vaccines in a single dose. As the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explains, the number of vaccines given to children has grown over time, as scientists have developed more vaccines that target more diseases, which ultimately prevents more childhood illness. In the process, several combination vaccines have also been developed, which reduces the total number of shots kids need.

For example, perhaps the best-known combination vaccine is the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella. There’s also the DTap vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Sometimes children will receive as many as six shots in a single medical visit, CHOP notes. But no shot or combination of shots given in a single doctor’s visit protects against 38 different diseases. In fact, a child given all the vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 2 years of age will be protected against 14 diseases (15 if including COVID-19).

Getting several vaccines at once isn’t a problem. “A number of studies have been done to look at the effects of giving various combinations of vaccines, and when every new vaccine is licensed, it has been tested along with the vaccines already recommended for a particular aged child. The recommended vaccines have been shown to be as effective in combination as they are individually,” the CDC explains on a webpage about multiple vaccinations. “Sometimes, certain combinations of vaccines given together can cause fever, and occasionally febrile seizures; these are temporary and do not cause any lasting damage.”

Contrary to Trump’s suggestion that vaccine doses are too big for children, vaccines are designed to contain the smallest amount of antigen, or active ingredient, needed to mount a protective immune response. Typically, antigens are killed or weakened virus or bacteria, or only a piece of a pathogen, such as a viral protein. This means they actually contain very little antigen relative to an infection — with the added bonus that a person doesn’t need to get sick to develop immunity. (As we’ve written before, with vaccination, age is what matters for dose — not weight.)

“All vaccines expose recipients to a smaller number of antigens (parts of viruses or bacteria that generate an immune response) than the actual virus or bacteria,” CHOP’s website explains. “Even when multiple vaccines are given together, the number of antigens is limited compared with the number of pathogens to which infants are exposed during a normal day. The difference is we know when our children were exposed to antigens through a vaccine, but we aren’t always aware of their exposures to diseases.”

The benefits of vaccines are clear. Globally, childhood vaccinations prevent some 4 million deaths a year, according to the CDC. And in many places, such as the U.S., vaccines have made many childhood illnesses largely a thing of the past. That includes measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, as well as polio, which in mid-century America killed or paralyzed thousands of children a year.

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CNN
 — 

The social media industry’s tepid response this week to the conspiracy theories floating wildly on their platforms about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump was part of a purposeful shift away from actively policing online speech – even in the face of potentially dangerous rhetoric.

The reaction could not be more different from 2021, in wake of the country’s last brush with political violence. That does not bode well for the coming election – or its aftermath.

Three years ago, major online platforms including Meta, Twitter and YouTube took swift action to keep the attack on America’s democracy on January 6 from spiraling online – suspending thousands of accounts that had promoted election lies, extending a pause on political advertising and removing posts that praised the US Capitol attack, among other moves.

In stark contrast, however, social media platforms over the past few days have been overrun by false claims about the attempt on Trump’s life, ranging from baseless left-wing speculation that the incident had been “staged” for Trump’s own political benefit to right-wing conspiracy theories falsely suggesting “deep state” government agents or perhaps President Joe Biden himself had somehow orchestrated the attack.

The incident was not staged. The US Secret Service has described it as an assassination attempt and the Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged it as a security failure. Investigators are still searching for the shooter’s motive. And Biden condemned political violence following the attack, pledging an independent investigation into the security lapse as well.

Big Tech CEOs have universally echoed Biden’s remarks. But amid the torrent of conspiracy theorizing, the social media platforms have been largely silent about their own role in how the event has played out online, reflecting a sharp departure from their previous hands-on approach to containing the spread of falsehoods that, left unchecked, could risk fueling further conflict.

None of the country’s largest social media platforms responded to repeated questions from CNN over multiple days this week about what actions they have taken in response to misinformation and conspiracy theories circulating about the Trump rally shooting. Meta, Google, TikTok and X did not respond. Only Snapchat issued a statement saying it is designed “differently from traditional social media” in that it doesn’t offer a curated news feed “where users can broadcast false information.”

The steadfast silence from tech platforms underscores how significantly industry giants have shifted in the past three years to embrace a more hands-off approach — in their latest attempt to juggle, in real time, competing values of free expression, online safety and political neutrality. And what the public experienced on social media in the moments after the attack on Trump is a sign of what’s to come, said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a social media watchdog group that advocates for tighter regulation of the platforms.

“This should be a hint,” Ahmed said, “that the months ahead are going to be just as unedifying, as stultifyingly stupid and as confusing as the last few days have been on social media.”

A dizzying array of factors have combined to create today’s more toxic information environment.

Most visibly, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now known as X, has transformed what was once the premier social media destination for breaking news into a messier, less trustworthy platform.

Musk has made multiple interlocking decisions around account verification, payments to creators, and whom to allow on the platform that have degraded users’ ability to trust each other and what they see there, misinformation researchers have long said. And he has erected barriers to independent accountability by forcing researchers to pay astronomical fees for access to the platform’s data.

Users on X are now being financially rewarded for posting the most inflammatory, engaging content regardless of its accuracy or truthfulness. Although Musk has touted X’s crowdbased fact-checking feature, Community Notes, as a bulwark against misinformation, it has been widely criticized as slow and ineffective. On Tuesday, CCDH published new research finding that of 100 top-performing conspiracy theory posts on X about Trump’s shooting, only five contained a Community Note refuting a false claim. The posts collectively garnered more than 215 million views on X, according to CCDH.

Soon after Musk bought the platform, he laid off roughly 80% of Twitter’s pre-acquisition headcount. The deep cuts affected the company’s trust and safety team responsible for safeguarding the platform and, in a separate move, Musk eliminated Twitter’s trust and safety council of outside experts.

But X wasn’t alone in reducing investments in trust and safety. Industrywide, companies cited tough macroeconomic conditions to justify sweeping layoffs that in some cases have hit trust and safety teams. In 2019, Snapchat had 763 employees working on trust and safety, a number that grew to more than 3,000 by 2021, the company told Congress this year. But by 2023, that figure had fallen 27% to 2,226. Meta and TikTok told lawmakers they each employ roughly 40,000 safety employees but did not disclose how that number has changed over time.

Social media companies retreated in other ways, too, from YouTube deciding to once again allow lies about the 2020 election on its platform to Meta deciding to stop amplifying news, politics and social issues in its curated feeds altogether.

“Meta decided that it can’t profitably deliver civic content,” said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and the co-director of Cybersecurity for Democracy, a research group focused on digital misinformation. “It can’t make a safe social media product that does politics and civic stuff, and so it just got out of that business.”

Baybars Orsek, managing director of the fact-checking organization Logically Facts, said these and other changes by social media platforms have made working with them in the last few years more challenging.

“It is concerning to see that some platforms have chosen to distance themselves from political discourse rather than enforce transparent and scalable policies to protect free speech while maintaining a safe information environment,” Orsek told CNN.

It isn’t just the companies’ own business decisions driving the shift. Since the 2020 election, researchers who study digital platforms have increasingly reported being harassed and intimidated, in some cases by US lawmakers who have baselessly alleged they are part of a government-led pressure campaign to silence right-wing speech on social media.

For years, some conservatives have said, the US government in regular meetings and emails with social media companies has pressured platforms to remove Covid-19 and election misinformation in violation of Americans’ First Amendment rights. Those claims reached a climax this year at the Supreme Court, where, in a closely watched ruling, a 6-3 majority declined to say that government efforts to persuade platforms to remove posts is unconstitutional.

The decision effectively means the US government can continue to flag misinformation threats to social media companies in the runup to the 2024 election. But it is still up to the companies to decide what to do with that information. And the Trump rally shooting now raises fresh questions about their willingness to act on it, especially against the backdrop of a sustained effort by right-wing social media critics to discredit trust and safety work and misinformation research.

The combination of all these factors led to ripe conditions for a misinformation maelstrom surrounding the Trump assassination attempt.

The incident touched off an intense demand for information. Mainstream media outlets, taking care to report only credible answers, were initially slower to report what was happening than the breakneck pace of social media speculation. That led to what researchers call an information void: a gap between what is known and what audiences want to know.

Meta’s decision not to amplify news and politics in curated feeds – part of a broader industry retrenchment on trust and safety driven by internal business pressures and external cultural ones – may have helped prevent some people from going down algorithmically recommended rabbit holes, at least on company-owned platforms.

But in the minutes after the shooting, some Threads users complained that mentions of the incident could not immediately be found on the site, in direct contrast to X – where, thanks in part to Musk’s prior decisions – conspiratorial thinking was already flowing fast and free.

Meta’s pullback from promoting news content likely contributed to the information void, Edelson said, as it failed to sufficiently elevate authoritative reporting and likely drove users into the arms of conspiracy theorists on other platforms.

The decision highlights the difficult tradeoffs of managing a fast-moving information ecosystem, said Orsek.

“The lack of stringent content moderation on X has led to a proliferation of misinformation, whereas Meta’s more conservative strategy has resulted in less immediate information [on its platforms], both verified and unverified,” Orsek said.

(The Verge reported Saturday that Meta did appear to be surfacing news outlets’ reporting about the shooting in Facebook search results, but that it inconsistently showed conspiracy-related content at the top of its trending topic on Threads for the incident.)

Meanwhile, Edelson added, TikTok also emerged as a key spreader of misinformation due to the way its recommendation algorithm surfaced videos it believed would resonate with users, rather than primarily authoritative information.

For other social media users, the episode highlighted how X remains the platform of choice for following big breaking news events online, even if the quality of the information is degraded. And the near-instant calcification of pro-Trump and anti-Trump false narratives surrounding the shooting shows how Americans are primed to look at the same event through completely different lenses, irrespective of the underlying facts.

The eagerness with which people on the right and, increasingly, on the left have embraced misleading claims linked to the shooting is a worrying sign for civil discourse and democracy, some researchers say.

That includes Alicia Wanless, director of the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has been researching how people create their own realities from the information they consume and the technology they use.

“I’ve been finding a pattern that after new technologies change how humans can produce and share information,” Wanless said, it leads to clashes of different realities in which supporters of various sides and ideologies try to do ever more to convince audiences that their narrative is the truth.

Historically, if the tension between realities can’t be resolved, Wanless warned, it often leads to violence.

“All my case studies led up to conflict,” she said.