I was at the Trump rally shooting — there was silence, then chaos
Fifty metres from a suspected assassination attempt on Donald Trump, supporters cried, called to Jesus and blamed CNN. This is what I saw and heard.
When the first shots rang out, there was silence. Then, the screaming started.
It was just after ten past six on Saturday evening at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. We and tens of thousands of others had been waiting for hours in the 35-degree heat to hear Donald Trump speak.
When he finally took to the stage, at 6.04pm, the crowd, many of them dressed in red Maga hats, cheered and whooped as he started speaking, about 50 metres from us.
Then a volley of jarring sounds cut through the summer air: high-pitched rattles that sounded like firecrackers. Everyone looked around, and just for a moment, there was a deadly quiet.
Secret Service agents clad in black suits jumped on Trump and pulled him to the ground. An instant later, the crowd of about 30,000 realised what had happened.
Someone near me shouted: “Get down, get down.”
“Oh my god, what the f..k,” a man next to me shouted.
A woman close by just repeated over again: “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, they’ve got him.”
A few seconds later people started to turn and run. Others remained where they stood, trying to see what happened, taking out their phones to film.
About 30 seconds later, Trump was pulled to his feet by what was now a morass of Secret Service agents who had thrown themselves on top of him. He looked shaken, and his Maga hat had fallen off. When the agents moved to pull him off the stage, he pushed them aside and raised his fist in a gesture of defiance.
Then he was gone, and there was only chaos.
Moments earlier, the atmosphere at the Butler Farm Show Grounds had been one of celebration. Wearing T-shirts with pro-Trump and anti-Biden slogans, the 45th president’s supporters had come from all over west Pennsylvania, and neighbouring Ohio, to hear the former president speak.
All had queued in the blistering heat for hours, some sheltering under umbrellas. We’d waited with them, and as we walked in we’d passed through metal detectors manned by uniformed Secret Service agents.
Trump finally came on stage to huge cheers — and a sea of phones raised in the air to film him.
Barbie Chapman, 50, who stood beside me in the crowd and wore a Stars and Stripes crop top, told me: “He’s always late, but that’s OK. We’re all having fun anyway”.
Speaking between two huge TV screens displaying the slogan “Pennsylvania is Trump country”; Trump told his adoring followers: “What a huge crowd. I wish they’d turn their cameras round and show how big the crowd is, but they never do that”.
Spontaneous chants of “Thank you Trump” erupted as he spoke, and began to tick off what he claimed his administration had achieved.
That’s when the shooting began. In the crowd, it was pandemonium. Several middle-aged women ran past me in tears, clearly deeply traumatised by what they’d just seen. Men also walked past me, shaking. Some younger men were very angry.
One man in his twenties raged: “This is CNN. This is Biden. They’ve done this to him.”
As the crowd made their way to the showground’s exit, small groups gathered in a circle on their knees to pray. Then, they too got moved on by police and the Secret Service, who appeared armed with light machineguns and told us all to leave.
“Get out! Everyone get out! Get out now!” they shouted.
As the chaos began to clear, I was marshalled out of the auditorium to an exit by the right of the stage, just as Trump’s motorcade of black 4x4s took off at speed with him inside, surrounded by a blaze of sirens and motorbike outriders.
Just by the stage I saw a team of uniformed medics working on someone who appeared to have been badly hurt. Bandages and plastic gloves were strewn on the floor around them. An ambulance pulled up alongside them five minutes later, but the casualty was clearly too sick to be picked up and the medics kept working on them on the ground.
As the crowd fled the scene, the horror and confusion of what had just happened were just sinking in. Witnesses named Lisa Reynolds, 55, and Debbie Jacob, 57, told me that the gunman wasn’t in the crowd but outside.
“We were about 150 yards from the shooter. We didn’t see him, but we heard the pops and saw the smoke from his fire,” Jacob said. “He wasn’t in the crowd, he was behind the chain fence. He must have had a rifle to get the shots that far — he must have been 500, 600 yards away. The Secret Service all ran for him and started jumping the fence.”
The two friends had come from Pittsburgh, 40 miles away, to go to the rally.
“This is a sad day for America, and for the family who suffered the loss. This just shouldn’t have happened in America,” Jacob said. “We can’t start blaming Biden and the Democrats, that’s just wrong. There is too much hatred in this country, too much of it everywhere.”
Juile Thimons, 55, who was standing, distraught, next to her husband told me: “It was horrifying, I can’t understand what just happened. It’s just terrifying. And with all this security here, how could they allow it to happen?”
A woman with long dyed blonde hair passed me, hysterical.
“I’m sick of this country and all this shit,” she shouted at anyone who would listen. “It has to stop.”
The Times
