American presidential politics has been punctuated by violence from its early days, from the infamous duel between then-Vice President Aaron Burr and former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, and attempts on a number of other presidents.

Former President Donald Trump now joins that list after suffering an injury when shots rang out at his campaign rally Saturday in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Trump said he was hit by a bullet that grazed his right ear.

Authorities said the shooter is dead, as well as one other person who was attending the rally. Several others were critically wounded.

More than a century ago, it was another former president seeking a comeback who faced an assassination attempt in a presidential campaign.

Theodore Roosevelt, who served as a Republican, was running in 1912 as the Progressive Party candidate, battling incumbent Republican President Howard Taft and Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson.

Roosevelt was shot by John Schrank, an immigrant who had stalked him while he campaigned that fall and finally took a shot at him on Oct. 14 as Roosevelt was getting into a car to head to a speech in Milwaukee.

Roosevelt, hit in the chest, would go on to deliver an hourlong speech, declaring “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

At the hospital later, doctors determined the bullet broke a rib and lodged near his right lung. A copy of a 50-page speech and Roosevelt’s eyeglass case had dissipated the force of the bullet.

Schrank was declared insane and lived out his life in a mental asylum.

Wilson suspended much of his campaign for the next two weeks, waiting until Roosevelt was out of the hospital and ready to campaign again before fully resuming his own campaign.

Wilson would go on to win, denying Roosevelt a third term.

The last president to face a serious assassination attempt was President Reagan, who in 1981 was shot by John Hinckley Jr. Reagan was struck by a round that ricocheted off the presidential limousine, though it wasn’t until he began coughing up blood that it was clear he had been injured.

He spent 12 days in the hospital recovering.

Hinckley was declared insane and spent decades in a mental facility before being granted unconditional release in 2022.

Former President George W. Bush faced his own bizarre assassination plot recently.

Authorities say an Iraqi immigrant plotted to smuggle an Islamic State hit squad across the southern border and he, himself, had cased Mr. Bush’s neighborhood in Dallas.

Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab was sentenced in February to more than 14 years in prison for the plot.

Thirty years earlier, it was Mr. Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, who faced an assassination attempt in Kuwait. In 1993, just months after he left office, Bush was the target of a plot by Iraqi intelligence.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.