The shots rang out at 6.10pm. Former President Donald J. Trump clutched his right ear as blood spurted out, then ducked for cover as supporters screamed and Secret Service agents raced to surround and protect him.

Within moments, someone shouted “shooter down” and the agents, agitated but in control, began moving Trump offstage to safety. “Wait, wait, wait, wait,” he called out, then made a point of pumping his fist at the crowd and seemed to defiantly shout, “Fight! Fight!” The crowd roared and responded with chants of “USA! USA!”

For the first time in more than four decades, a man who had been elected President
of the United States was wounded in an assassination attempt when a gunman who appeared to have crawled onto a nearby roof fired at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday evening. The explosion of political violence came at an especially volatile moment in American history and further inflamed an already stormy campaign for the White House.

After Secret Service snipers killed the shooter, the former President and putative Republican presidential nominee was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment and declared “fine” by his campaign. But a male spectator at the rally was killed and two other men were critically wounded, authorities said. The motivation for the attack remained under investigation.

“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” Trump wrote later on his social media site. “Much bleeding took place, so I realised then what was happening.” Trump said he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.”

President Joe Biden, who at the time of the shooting was at church in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he has a vacation home, went before television cameras to condemn the shooting. “Look, there’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” Biden said. “It’s sick. It’s sick. It’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country. We cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”

He later reached Trump by phone and left Delaware to fly back to the White House. By the end of the evening, Trump had left the hospital and been taken to the Pittsburgh airport to fly back to his home in New Jersey.

The gunman was identified early on Sunday by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, but officials released no additional information about him. A voter registration record showed that Crooks was registered as a Republican, although federal campaign finance records indicated that he had donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a liberal voter turnout group, in January 2021.

The attack came just two days before the opening in Milwaukee of the Republican National Convention, which is set to nominate Trump for President for the third time, and his campaign confirmed that he still planned to be there. Even as Biden’s campaign said that it would suspend television advertising, supporters of Trump quickly blamed liberals, the news media and Biden for stoking animosity against the former President and said that it had led to the attack.

While there were unsuccessful assassination attempts, incidents or plots targeting George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama during or after their terms, Trump was the first current or former President wounded in an act of violence since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 by a would-be assassin trying to impress a Hollywood actress. Authorities have reported a surge in threats against elected and appointed officials of both parties in recent years, with anger having come to dominate the political discourse.

Trump has often been accused of fomenting violence, most notably on January 6, 2021, when he encouraged a throng of supporters to march on the Capitol, where they ransacked the building in an attempt to stop Congress from ratifying Biden’s election victory.

But there have been spasms of violence from the Left as well, including the arrest of an armed man outside the house of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 and the shooting of a Republican congressional leader during a baseball practice in 2017.

The national security division of the justice department planned to open an investigation into the attempt to shoot Trump, an indication that the department regarded the shooting not as an isolated act of violence but as an assassination attempt with national security implications.

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said the suspected shooter was on “an elevated position” outside the security perimeter, meaning he had not been screened by magnetometers as had those who attended the event.

The gunman fired “multiple shots toward the stage”, Guglielmi said. Analysis of video and audio indicated that the gunman was roughly 400 feet north of the stage and that eight shots were fired.

Law enforcement officials recovered an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle from a deceased White male they believe was the gunman at the scene, according to two law-enforcement officials. At a late-night news conference, officials declined to discuss a possible motivation pending further investigation.

“At this time, we have no reason to believe there is any other existing threat out there,” Lt Col George Bivens of the Pennsylvania State Police said, adding it was “too early” to say whether it was a lone-wolf attack.

The rally was a typical Saturday night campaign event for Trump. It was hot in Butler, and the former President was starting about an hour late. Wearing a red Make America Great Again baseball cap with his suit but no tie, Trump was showing supporters a chart with numbers of border crossings just minutes into his speech when shots rang out in two bursts.

“If you really want to see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened... ” he said and then abruptly stopped as the hail of gunfire erupted.

Corey Check, a local conservative activist and Republican committeeman in Butler, and his friend Nathan Rybner were sitting in a section of seats to the right of where Trump was standing when they heard a series of loud pops. The sounds seemed to be coming from over their heads in the section where they were sitting, they said.

“I heard what I thought was firecrackers,” said Rybner, a Republican committeeman from Erie County, Pennsylvania. “It did not sound like a typical gunshot.”

Eduardo Vargas, 31, said he was sitting about 15 feet behind Trump and had heard the first shot. Vargas said that he did not know whether Trump had been shot. But minutes later, he said, he saw that Trump had blood on his forehead.

The Secret Service told everyone to “Get down! Get down!” Vargas said. “I saw half the people around me start crying,” he said. “And I started crying. I couldn’t stop crying.”

Vargas said he feared the worst. “I thought I just saw the President get killed in front of my face,” he said.

Theresa Koshut, a teacher from Pittsburgh sitting in the fifth row, said she immediately ducked when she heard what she thought were shots. Koshut was all too familiar with active-shooter drills from school. “I dropped and rolled under the bleachers,” she said. “I didn’t even think.”

Onstage, agents shielded Trump, trying to place themselves between him and any threat. Someone called out, “Sir, sir, sir!”

Secret Service snipers, who are usually positioned away from the President on a roof or some other location, appeared out of nowhere, rushing onstage holding automatic rifles.

The shooting comes at a time Trump has been leading Biden in most polls, both nationally and in battleground states like Pennsylvania. Biden has been trying to quell an internal revolt from many Democrats who want him to step aside as a candidate following his unsteady and confused performance at a debate with Trump last month.

Just hours before the attack in Pennsylvania, Biden assailed Trump for opposing gun control. “I want to ban assault weapons and require universal background checks,” the President wrote on social media. “Trump promised the NRA that he’d do nothing about guns. And he means it.”

The convention starting on Monday in Milwaukee will almost certainly be electrified by the Saturday shooting, both in terms of politics and security. A nominating convention already is viewed by authorities as a major security challenge, and officials will presumably be reviewing their plans for the GOP conclave, which goes until Thursday.

Donald Trump Jr, the President’s eldest son, said he had spoken with his father by telephone after the attack and had found him in “great spirits”.

Chris LaCivita, the former President’s campaign adviser, quickly cited the attack in making the case for Trump.

“For years, and even today, leftist activists, democrat donors and now even @JoeBiden have made disgusting remarks and descriptions of shooting Donald Trump it’s high time they be held accountable for it the best way is through the ballot box,” he wrote on social media. It was unclear what remarks by Biden he was citing.

New York Times News Service