Saturday’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump has sent our national political tension up to an 11. How we respond to this traumatizing event is crucial, and the stakes for our country are high. As our leaders navigate the troubled aftermath, they can take some comfort in the fact that we’re not totally in the dark — America’s history is not free of difficult moments.

The worst thing political leaders can do is create a panicked narrative that this awful moment — one in which multiple people were injured and one person was killed — is what will take down the American experiment. After all, the country was literally split in half until months before Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and hundreds of thousands of people died to reunite it. If there was ever a time for the American experiment to fail — long before social media and cable news — it was then.