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The Assassins: For Joe Biden, Pipe Bombs and a Nazi Takeover
This is the second in a weekly series, detailing forty-five times that one or more persons attempted to assassinate a current or former American president. Twenty-one presidents were targeted; seventeen survived. We begin with the most recent to face an assassin’s bullets and work backwards to 1835 … and President Andrew Jackson.
Cesar Sayoc and his pipe bombs …
In 2018, Cesar Sayoc was a 56-year-old resident of Florida, who had worked at various odd jobs, mostly in food service. He apparently lived in his vehicle, a white van that was that was easily recognized: the side and rear windows of the van were plastered with Trump-boosting stickers, decals and what a co-worked described simply as disturbing images. “It waspuppets with their heads cut off,” he added, “mannequins with their heads cutoff, Ku Klux Klan, a black person being hung, anti-gay symbols, torchings, bombings, you name it, it was all over his truck.”
Those who knew Cesar used words like “delusional” and “crazed” to describe him. Ironically, the man whose rhetoric inspired Sayoc to break the law was Donald J. Trump. In the current campaign, Trump has repeatedly accused Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of using inflammatory language, and has sought to blame them for inciting two recent assassination attempts…