Another day on the job

BUTLER, Pa. — It wasn’t the first three pops that worried photojournalist Scott Goldsmith.

It wasn’t even the fourth pop, nor was it Donald Trump grabbing his ear and falling to the floor of the platform from which he was speaking.

It was the scream that followed, from where he didn’t know.

Trump was bleeding, though Goldsmith didn’t know that at the moment, either. The former president had just survived an assassination attempt.

The shooter was Thomas Crooks, the first would-be assassin to make an attempt on the life of an American president since John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan in 1981.

The attempt by Crooks led to the resignation of the head of the Secret Service and an overhaul in how candidates were protected by law enforcement in the lead-up to the 2024 election. It shook Americans of both parties in a year when many feared political instability.

And on the day of the event, the people who documented it most closely – and those who may have returned to the moment the most since – were news photographers. People like Goldsmith, Sebastian Foltz and Rebecca Droke.

Photographers are often put into situations that normal people avoid. The photographers who win Pulitzer Prizes are the best examples of this. Award-winning photographers go where others would not dare, from migrant caravans, to famine-starved regions in Yemen, to chronicling the effects of Ebola in Africa.

Facing a dangerous or at least important moment wasn’t completely uncommon for the photographers at the Trump rally. Droke, a former editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer with her photo staff for their coverage of the Tree of Life shooting in 2018. Foltz has documented deadly car crashes. Goldsmith has photographed Trump, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and many more.

Photographers are normally told to protect themselves when they cover dangerous events. Some do. Others follow the advice of World War II photographer Robert Capa: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

Butler, July 13

Butler County, which gave Trump 65.6% of its votes in 2020 and 65.7% four years later, sits just north of Pittsburgh, an unassuming spot that will now be forever known for what happened – and what didn’t – on July 13.

The fairgrounds where the Trump rally was held that day could have been subbed out for any fairgrounds from western Pennsylvania to eastern Kansas, with a small, wooden ticket box as the only real security guarding it months later. A 10-minute drive away through rolling hills, Butler is a borough still moving from its historic roots of the 1800s to contemporary America with new versions of its courthouse, hotels and churches.

On the morning of the Thursday rally, traffic was a mess, slowing down Goldsmith, Foltz and Droke.

“I thought I was being smart,” Goldsmith, a self-employed Indiana University graduate said in an interview. “I planned on getting there three hours early so I could walk in slowly and look at stuff and photograph stuff, which I ended up doing anyway. But Butler's a small town. There was a lot of traffic. After I got there, (it) took me three hours to pull into the parking lot, maybe two hours and 45 minutes.”

Foltz, who shot for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Droke, who shot for AFP News Agency – the French wire service – had the same issues.

Foltz got into the rally around 10:30 a.m. Droke arrived closer to 1 p.m.

“The crowd was a sea of signs and fervent faces, all focused on the figure who stood at the center of their attention. ‘I’m Proud To Be an American’ by Lee Greenwood blared loudly over the crowd of cheering supporters, campaign signs, and the growing fervor,” Goldsmith later wrote in an online post. “Trump entered with his traditional fist pump, pointing at the crowd.”

At first, the rally’s run of show was typical for a Trump rally. The candidate was preceded by a few local politicians: former U.S. Senate candidate Sean Parnell; U.S. Representative Mike Kelly; U.S. Senate candidate David McCormick; U.S. Representative Dan Meuser; and, the mayor of Slippery Rock, JD Longo. Trump was an hour late to his scheduled start time of 5 p.m.

The biggest issue, Droke said, was making sure she wasn’t overheated in 90-plus degree temperatures. The heat was expected, as was the vitriol that Trump directed toward the media in attendance.

“The very first thing he said, ‘Thank you. What a great crowd. What a great crowd.’ And then he said, ‘But the evil media won't show it. They won't show the crowd. They won't show anybody back there,’” Goldsmith said.

Trump spoke for several minutes, hitting on his normal campaign talking points – foreign relations, issues with the economy, crime, and more. He turned to show the crowd a chart about immigration rates.

“It was pop, pop, pop,” Goldsmith said.

“And that told me it was firecrackers because usually it's a string. You light the string, and there's three or four to go,” he continued. “Everybody stopped just to look around and see what it was. And then the third pop went off, and the fourth one, I think, is what went by his ear.”

Foltz, a long distance from the Colorado wildlife he used to shoot and write about, knew pretty quickly what was going on.

“It all happened so fast, but it didn't sound like fireworks to me,” he said. “Maybe the first one was like, ‘Hey, what's that?’ But then it was like, ‘OK, yeah, that's what it is. Where's it coming from? Should I duck?’”

For Droke, it was just chaos.

“I was on a step stool to get over the TV cameras. I know I kind of jerked, and stepped down,” said Droke, a self-described visual storyteller with 18 years of professional experience. “And then I think I was trying to figure out where the, you know, at first it was like, OK, firecrackers, gunshots, whatever. I started looking around to see where it had come from.”

People screamed. A water tank exploded near the stage, apparently hit by one of the slugs. Trump hit the deck as Secret Service agents jumped on top of his body.

Each photographer took a second. “Am I …?” No. They each were OK. Back to work.

Goldsmith had bad luck. He had taken the storage card out of his long lens seconds earlier to transmit some images to Politico. When the first shot went off, all he had was a 50mm wide lens, not ideal for a tight focus on the cluster of Secret Service agents around Trump. With no other option, Goldsmith pushed the trigger on that camera.

Goldsmith later discovered that he captured the moment after Secret Service snipers killed Crooks as people in the crowd ducked from possible bullets. At the time, though, Goldsmith didn’t feel he had much material.

He switched to his long lens, forgetting there was no card in the camera. Goldsmith shot the pile on top of Trump for several seconds, remembered he was shooting without a card in, took the card out of his wide lens, put it in the long lens, and went back to capturing the moment.

Foltz, attributing his quick thinking to his time shooting sports and playing video games, turned his camera to the crowd. He turned back to the podium and, thinking Trump had already been taken away, turned his camera toward the former president’s car. When he realized Trump was still on stage, Foltz turned his camera back there.

“I heard him say, ‘My shoes,’” Foltz said. “I heard him get up, because the audio was still from the microphone stand. And I heard him say, ‘Let me get my shoes.’ And then I heard the whole fight thing.

“So I kept shooting him. And there was a little bit of time, because he did the fist pump and then he did it again. And I got the crowd behind him a little bit, and I remember hearing it. It was just a weird sequence because it went from concern to this real, patriotic ‘U-S-A’ chant.”

Droke photographed both the crowd and Trump before turning her camera to the stands behind the former president. She saw a man covered in blood and, unbeknownst to her, the scene where Corey Comperatore, a rally-goer attending with his family, was fatally wounded.

“I saw the doctor covered in blood,” Droke said. “I saw a man covered in blood who was alive and moving around and those other folks. So I was just like, ‘Something happened here.’”

Droke took a moment to text her mother that she was OK. Then it was back to her camera.

Agents shoved Trump into his car, and a motorcade whisked him to Butler Memorial Hospital. He was released later that day.

With Trump gone, rally attendees turned their attention to the cameras. As they looked at the intimidating figures cursing them out and blaming them for the shooting, the photographers paused for a moment. Again, the question: Am I OK? But they realized there was no physical danger and went back to work.

While the crowd wasn’t pleased with the photographers, things never turned violent. As they realized the violence was over and they were in no danger, the attendees left in an orderly fashion, though car searches from law enforcement created traffic backups on the way out.

After several minutes of holding down the triggers on their cameras, the three photographers went under the risers where they had been standing to edit their photos. A few moments later, the Secret Service kicked them out and declared the site an official crime scene.

Goldsmith took his time leaving the venue. He wanted to get some shots of the empty fairgrounds. After two agents told him to leave the area on separate occasions, Goldsmith did so.

On his way out, Goldsmith found Droke. Two officers had guns pointed at the photographer as she threw her hands in the air. After explaining that she was media, the police allowed her to move on, and Droke left the venue, meeting up with the writer covering the rally with her for AFP. She needed to feel safe.

“I didn't want to sit in the car, so I sat in between the cars, but I went back to a fence where no one could be behind me, and then we were tucked in, a building was in front of us,” Droke said. “People who were leaving the fairgrounds couldn't really see me. This was my secure little spot that I can see everything coming at me.”

Foltz, in a similar situation, found himself editing on a patch of grass. Holding his work and personal phones and stretching them upward to the sky, he tried to get enough signal to send something to his editors in Pittsburgh.

Foltz didn’t want his outlet running something from The Associated Press on the front page when he was at the biggest story ever to happen in Butler. He got one image in before the 8 p.m. deadline, and the paper’s first story carried his photo of a defiant Trump, his face smeared with blood.

Goldsmith left the venue after most of the rally goers. He waited around for two hours to process the photos he shot and then left town.

Foltz stayed. He arrived at the home of a former co-worker around 11 p.m. and spent the next several days covering the aftermath of the event. Foltz even wrote a piece about the experience for the Post-Gazette on that friend’s porch and sacrificed two days of a four-day vacation to continue his coverage.

Droke also spent a few days in Butler and managed to get a picture of Crooks’ home when a drunk neighbor showed her the way past the police surrounding the house.

Moving on

Since they left Butler, none of the three photographers said they felt the need to cope with the events they shot. It was part of the job, they said. They compartmentalized.

“We just weren't that scared. I think being there and seeing how it unfolded took – it was still tragic, it was still horrible, it was still monumental, but it wasn't scary. I don't know why it wasn't scary,” Goldsmith said. “Maybe down the road, it might resurface, but it hasn't yet.”

“Sunday, I was just too busy to even process anything. Back to work. And then Monday, I started to get interview requests. I started talking to people, and I think that's when it was like, ‘Oh, this is surreal.’ But I was really calm,” Droke said. “I think day-to-day life didn't change that much. I didn't feel unsafe in the house.”

Foltz compared the experience to what first responders go through all the time.

“I used to hear stories about, like doctors, and I never thought I could be a paramedic or anything, because of the stuff you see, but I think you just compartmentalize it,” Foltz said. “It's just like that happened. And like, people talk about firemen, responding to car accidents, you just do your job, and then you go home and put that away.”

“All in all, it was an interesting experience,” Foltz said. “I feel pretty good about how I handled it.”