The Reporters Who Were There Explain What They Saw During an Attempted Assassination of Trump

The stunning images and videos out of Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday will reverberate for years to come: Former President Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raising his fist in the air as blood drips down his face; the video of him dropping the ground as pops are heard in the distance.

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It was a moment of chaos, with facts and certainty in short supply, and speculation immediately running rampant.

For the reporters that were covering the rally, it was a similarly disorienting experience.

Most were on the press risers in the crowd when the shots rang out.

“I had my back to the former president, I was facing the camera, about to go on TV. I had my earpiece in, my microphone in my hand, and I was facing the opposite direction,” recalls Scott Macfarlane, CBS News’ congressional correspondent, who was covering his first ever Trump rally.

It was then that the “pop pop pop” of what we now know were gunshots that immediately sent many members of the press scrambling for cover, suddenly fearful for their own lives, or those of their crews.

“We just assumed it was part of the show or some knucklehead off site shooting off some fireworks,” he added. “But then, after the movement on the stage and the screams in the crowd, we recognized it was something much more sinister.”

“I don’t really remember those moments very well. I remember thinking in my head, I feel silly doing this, This is probably just like, probably nothing, but we’re just taking this as a precaution,” says NBC news national correspondent Dasha Burns. “But then my producer, Bianca, told me later that she could feel me shaking and hear me breathing really, really fast. I think my body knew and understood something that my mind like didn’t quite want to understand, looking back on it.”

The chaos gave way to urgency, as the reporters scrambled to figure out what had happened, with Trump rushed off by the Secret Service, and attendees told to leave the premises of what had become an active crime scene.

Some other journalists, however, were stuck outside of the rally venue. The BBC’s chief North America political correspondent Gary O’Donoghue was one of them.

“We had actually been refused credentials for the Trump rally, the BBC often gets refused credentials for Trump rallies,” he recalls. His location would turn out to be a blessing in disguise, with O’Donoghue securing an interview that would change coverage of the event.

In the meantime, back inside the venue there was anger from some attendees directed toward the journalists in the press area.

“There were some people in the crowd that as soon as the former president was taken away and taken off that stage, turned around and started pointing at the press and yelling,” says Fox News correspondent Alexis McAdams. “But overall, I think people were focused on safety and wanted to see where their family members were and try to find an escape route.”

“There was a small minority in the rally who, immediately after turned to face us, gestured at us, cursed at us, threatened us, said it was our fault we did this,” MacFarlane says. “But they were so quickly either ushered out or escorted out or ordered out by police that it was a pretty short interaction.”

It was an issue O’Donoghue faced as well, with a man getting between him and his cameraman, and others venting their anger at his crew.

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“The vast majority of people I spoke to that night were incredibly respectful and were very keen to share their views, even though they were angry, and someone were very, very angry,” he says. In fact, you know, a guy came past and he didn’t want to be interviewed, and just simply walked up to me and said, ‘they shot first. This is f-ing war.’ And that, I have to tell you, that sent a shiver up my spine that I will never, ever forget.”

O’Donoghue, who is totally blind, said that while covering the rally and the aftermath of the shooting he did something he normally does not do, which is to physically touch the people he was speaking to.

“I don’t normally do that, because you are invading people’s space a bit, but I wanted the people I was talking to — including the angry guy who stood in front of my camera — I wanted him to know that I wasn’t just some disembodied guy from out-of-town in a suit who didn’t understand anything, least of all, his life in western Pennsylvania, I wanted him to know me as another human being. I wanted him to sort of feel my heat, feel my hand, you know, feel me close to him, as a way of trying to aid that communication.”

It was an interview conducted by O’Donoghue, featuring a man named Greg who said he saw the shooter climb on top of a building, and that he had tried to warn police, that would ricochet across the internet Saturday, ultimately getting picked up by American networks like CBS in the process.

What Greg described, the shooter’s ability to get a clear line of sight, the warnings to police, that seem sure to dominate coverage in the weeks ahead as the investigations into what happened unfold.

“He [Greg] was incredibly consistent,” O’Donoghue recalls. “I was trying to listen, and also just asking short, quick questions about what he was saying, getting into repeat stuff, and he kept saying the same thing, and that’s what made me think, look, this is a guy who has seen something here, and it was immediately apparent to me that what he had seen was enormously significant.”

“There’s going to be some type of investigation here as to where were the vulnerabilities, what went wrong, what needed to happen that didn’t happen,” MacFarlane says. “That’s going to be a big part of our mission, because failures led to death, and on Jan. 6 failures led to a national trauma, and there’s a symmetry there, there needs to be an investigation to figure out what went wrong, to prevent it from happening in the future, for sure.”

Trump’s rally began at 6, but all of the correspondents interviewed worked until the early hours of the following day, filing stories, doing live hits, and interviewing witnesses. O’Donoghue says that his team filed their final report from a Sheetz gas station a few miles down the street shortly after 1 a.m.

But it was also a deeply personal experience. Not only covering the attempted assassination of a former president and current presidential hopeful, but a mass shooting, one that they were witnesses to, where they had to duck and cover themselves.

“I pride myself on being an empathetic person and bringing that to my reporting, but in this case, I understood, you know firsthand, how shaken people were, how confused, how saddened,” Burns says.

“I think it just shows that it can change at a moment’s notice,” McAdams says. “You need to be prepared mentally for anything that can happen, because, again, you really have to stay in that mindframe that it’s not about me, it’s about talking to those people and getting their stories out there to the public.”

“I’ve never been present when someone was actually pulling the trigger, and it will never leave me, you know, it will never leave me,” O’Donoghue says. “And I think I realized in that moment how traumatizing that can be.”

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