Trump Has Faced Nearly 20 Threat Incidents Since Taking Office in 2017, Including Three Assassination Attempts

Donald Trump has faced nearly 20 known threats since first taking office in 2017, according to Fox News, including three assassination attempts. That puts him well ahead of every other American president in modern history when it comes to sheer frequency of targeting.

For context on scale: every other U.S. president who faced an assassination attempt dealt with just one, except Gerald Ford, who survived two, according to Fox News. That list includes Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Four of them — Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy — were killed. Trump has now survived three separate assassination attempts and nearly a dozen other threat-related incidents in just the past two years alone.

The incidents cluster into phases: three during the 2016 campaign before he took office, seven during his first presidency, four during his 2024 campaign, and eight more since his second term began, according to Fox News.

The two most-cited assassination attempts both came during the 2024 campaign. In July 2024, a gunman opened fire from a rooftop at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, killed one spectator, critically wounded two others, and struck Trump's upper right ear before a Secret Service sniper killed him. Two months later, in September 2024, Secret Service agents found Ryan Wesley Routh hiding in bushes with a rifle near Trump's Florida golf course while Trump was golfing. Routh was arrested and later sentenced to life in prison.

A third incident Fox News counts as a major security breach happened in April 2026, during the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which Trump attended. A suspect identified as Cole Allen allegedly charged a security checkpoint carrying multiple weapons and shot an officer before being taken into custody. Outgoing White House Correspondents' Association president Weijia Jiang has described watching Trump huddle with Cabinet officials in the aftermath as journalists raced to report the unfolding crisis.

Two men wounded in the Butler shooting have separately sued the federal government, alleging preventable Secret Service failures, according to Fox News.