By Peter Baker, Simon J. Levien and Michael Gold

WASHINGTON — The shots rang out at 6:10 p.m. Former President Donald 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 was elected president of the United States was wounded in an assassination attempt when a gunman who appeared to have crawled onto a nearby roof opened fire at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday (13) 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 realized 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 left the hospital and was taken to the Pittsburgh airport to fly back to his home in New Jersey.

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 of threats against elected and appointed officials of both parties in recent years, as anger has come to dominate the political discourse.

Trump has often been accused of fomenting violence, most notably on Jan. 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 spokesperson for the Secret Service, said that the suspected shooter was on “an elevated position” outside the security perimeter, meaning that he was not screened by magnetometers as were 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 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. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as part of its standard procedure in mass or high-profile shootings, was running an emergency trace on the weapon, using the national firearms purchasing database, which could be critical in definitively identifying the shooter.

At a late-night news conference, law enforcement officials said they believed they had identified the slain shooter, who had no identification on him, but they were withholding his name until it was completely confirmed as they seek a DNA match. They 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 that 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 committee member 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.

Trump initially seemed shocked and disoriented. As the agents tried to hustle him away, he said, “Let me get my shoes.”

“I got you, sir,” said one of the agents. “I got you, sir.”

“Let me get my shoes,” he repeated.

“Hold that on your head,” an agent said. “It’s bloody.”

“Sir, we’ve got to get moved to the car, sir,” said another. “Move to the car, sir.”

After Trump thrilled the crowd with his fist pump and made it offstage on his own power, his arm draped over the shoulder of an agent, some in the crowd quickly saw political implications. “Trump was just elected today, folks,” one man shouted. “He is a martyr.”

The shooting came as 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 Monday (15) 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 that he had spoken with his father by telephone after the attack and had found him in “great spirits,” according to a statement. “He will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him,” the younger Trump said.

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican majority leader who was shot in the 2017 baseball practice incident, was more explicit in blaming the opposition for the attack. “For weeks Democrat leaders have been fuelling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America,” he said in a statement. “Clearly we’ve seen far-left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.”

Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, who is considered a front-runner to be named Trump’s running mate in the next few days, echoed the accusation. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” he wrote on social media. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

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.

Two conservative billionaires, Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, chose the moment to endorse Trump. Musk assailed the Secret Service and suggested the former president’s agents might have intentionally exposed him to danger. “Extreme incompetence or it was deliberate,” he wrote on his social media site. “Either way, the SS leadership must resign.”

A couple of far-right House members blamed Biden, citing his recent comment that it was time to stop talking about the debate and “put Trump in a bull’s eye.” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., said in a television interview that “Joe Biden is responsible for the shooting.” Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., wrote on social media that “Joe Biden sent the orders.”

For their part, ranking Democrats made no mention of partisan politics in their statements, confining their comments to expressions of outrage over the attack, relief that Trump had survived and general concern about political violence in the United States.

In addition to Biden, Democrats who quickly denounced the attempt on Trump’s life included some of his most vocal critics, like Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Reps. Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Nancy Pelosi of California.

“I thank God that former President Trump is safe,” said Pelosi, the former House speaker whose husband was critically wounded by a hammer-wielding attacker who broke into their San Francisco home in 2022 looking for her.

-New York Times