From the very beginning, Donald Trump made it clear that he wasn’t going to play by the rules. He’s mocked disabled reporters, bragged about sexual assault, and even suggested that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any voters.
Ironically, it seems that Trump’s cavalier attitude towards violence may have inspired some of his detractors to take a more literal approach to their opposition. Now, let’s be clear – violence is never the answer, and attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate is a serious crime that should not be taken lightly. But at the same time, it’s hard not to feel a certain sense of karmic justice in the idea of Trump facing the consequences of his own inflammatory rhetorics.
Due to this, Trump almost found himself on the other end of a gun barrel on June 18, 2016.
What exactly happened?
It was a day like any other on the campaign trail, until suddenly it wasn’t. On June 18, 2016, as then-candidate Donald Trump was delivering a speech at a rally in Las Vegas, a British man named Michael Steven Sandford attempted to grab a police officer’s gun, allegedly with the intent of shooting Trump. Sandford, who was 20 years old at the time, had even gone to a gun range the day before the rally to learn how to shoot.
Now, before you jump out of your chair in alarm or excitement (depending on your political leanings), let’s clarify that this “attempt” wasn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be.
For one thing, he had a history of mental illness. Moreover, the security at these events was no joke. There were metal detectors, bag checks, and plenty of police and Secret Service agents on hand. Sandford never even made it close to the stage before he was tackled and arrested. In fact, Trump claimed he wasn’t aware of the assassination plot himself, until he watched the news on TV.
Sandford, the would-be assassin, claimed he had been planning the attack for about a year. A whole year! If you’re going to plan something for that long, you’d think he would have come up with a better strategy than “grab a gun from a cop and hope for the best.”
In the end, Sandford pleaded guilty to charges related to the incident and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison. A fitting punishment, some might say, for the crime of attempting to inject a modicum of excitement into the 2016 election circus.
Trump, of course, went on to win the election, proving once and for all that even an alleged assassination attempt can’t stop the inexorable march of a man with a bad spray tan and an even worse haircut.