What the CNN reporter saw on the ground when Trump was attacked

CNN
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CNN reporter Alayna Treene reports Donald Trump and was at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, as Shots were fired on SaturdayShe spoke to CNN’s Zachary Wolf about what she saw.

TREENE: It was supposed to be a normal rally, honestly, like any other. I’ve been to – I can’t even count, over 20 – the majority of Donald Trump’s rallies since his third campaign, and it was a scene like any other.

There is so much security presence.

People often say, “Oh, you have to be careful, you have to be cautious.” And I often feel like a rally is one of the safest places because there’s always so much intelligence there. There’s local police on the ground. You have to go through several magnetometers. You have very limited options as to what you can take. With CNN, we also get security ourselves, given the divisive nature of politics right now. So it was remarkable for me to see what happened.

When the shots rang out, we were on the stage. We’re in the middle of the crowd. Usually the crowd is big, and then we’re above it. The stages are elevated. We’re above the crowd so we can see. We’re in line with the stage and maybe 100 yards from the stage.

We had just gone live at 6 p.m. and started listening to Donald Trump. Then, a few minutes into his speech, we heard the pop-pop-pop. From my vantage point, it was on the left side of the stage. It was coming from Donald Trump’s right shoulder.

At first I thought it was fireworks. I had no idea what it was. Everyone was looking, at least from where I was standing, and thinking, “What was that?”

And you could see Donald Trump. He was referring to a graph that showed some of the frontier numbers from his time in office. And you could see him, his face looking in that direction too, as if to say, “What was that?” before he touched his ear and fell to the ground.

From one side of the stage, to his right, we could hear the gunshots. But then there was a green tractor on the left side of the stage, and after the first volley of gunshots, after the bangs we heard, I think the tractor or something on it had been hit, because immediately there was this cloud. All the steam was coming from the other side, the opposite side of the stage. When I spoke to people on the scene, they said they thought the bullets had hit something in the truck, which caused the steam to escape.

I remember thinking at first, “Is this part of the program? What’s going on here?”

And then, of course, we heard everyone screaming. Immediately, it was absolute chaos. The Secret Service told us to get on the floor. My security guy came up in the stands and grabbed me. He said we had to get under the stands and pulled me down there. He basically threw me on the floor and then got on top of mine. And I remember thinking I had to get up and see what was going on. But he held me and the other people around me and just said don’t move. Stay down. Stay down. And then we saw people start cheering and I peeked out from under the stands. And there was Donald Trump standing up, the Secret Service standing around him, pumping his fist in the air and being escorted off the stage. And then we crawled back out, and I went back up in the stands to figure out what was going on and what to do next.

When I interviewed several of the participants, many of whom were sitting in the stands behind him, some in the front rows, they had no idea what was going on. Everyone was stunned, including me. I don’t think anyone ever imagined that something like this could happen.

I was talking to my producer today. Sometimes you go to rallies like that, you go to so many, it’s the same thing. You’re just waiting to see what Donald Trump has to say. But never in a million years did we expect an assassination like that. I just don’t think it would ever cross our minds because you always feel so protected by all the law enforcement and intelligence agencies on the ground. Everyone I talked to who was there, including the people in the stands behind, had no idea.

The venue was on this fairground, all grass. There was the big crowd, the press area with the podiums was in the middle of the crowd, and then there was the stage in front of us. But there was a fence, a chain link fence, surrounding the whole thing, keeping the rally in. And the people next to the fence, closest to the building where the shooter was, some people over there had noticed and seen that there was a shooter, and they were screaming. And then, you know, shortly after that, shots rang out.

But the people I spoke to who were standing behind him had a similar reaction to me: “Could those have been fireworks?”

I interviewed a man named Joseph Meyn who said the same thing. At first he thought it might be fireworks. “Could this be part of the program?” A woman I spoke to today – her name was Renee – said she was right behind Donald Trump in the stands behind him and she didn’t really understand what happened until she saw Donald Trump go down. And that’s when she thought, “Oh, wow, you have to go down. Something really bad is happening.”

Shocking details of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump

Immediately afterward, I went back to the podium. Everyone was disoriented. People were screaming in the crowd. We went live almost immediately. I started talking to Wolf Blitzer. A few minutes later, the Secret Service started ushering everyone out, turning off our devices, and yelling at everyone, “You need to get out of here. You need to leave the venue. This is an active crime scene.”

They came to the press and told us we had to leave. They pulled some of us away and downstairs. The (phone) service was also completely disrupted. At one point we were told that they had started jamming all the cell towers for the entire service. So we couldn’t call anyone. We didn’t know how to contact DC. That was obviously my first goal when I was still trying to figure out what to do. But eventually we just walked out.

A lot of the rally attendees were very angry at the press. When I was still on stage, people were yelling at us, “This is your fault.” I think they were really looking for an outlet for their anger, and at Trump rallies, Donald Trump often talks about “fake news.” A lot of people are yelling at us all the time. That’s why we usually bring security. So it was a heightened version of that.

We went out the way we came and they had blocked off the parking lot as well. So everyone was trying to get in their cars and leave the premises but they couldn’t. People were stuck in their cars for over an hour, maybe two or three hours, and we did some live footage but then we also realized that people weren’t moving, they were here. So we just walked around and said, “Hi, would you mind doing an interview with us? We’d love to talk about your experiences and everyone else’s experiences in these moments.”

Most people wanted to share what they had seen and felt. And that’s how it happened.

Later on Saturday night, we had seen videos on social media showing where the suspected shooter was and eventually killed by snipers. Since we couldn’t leave the rally site by car, we ran there on foot with our equipment. We were the only camera crew I saw, at least at that point, set up outside the building.

I saw at least a dozen police cars, some from the sheriff’s department, some from the state police, cordoning off the building. An officer confirmed later that evening that the gunman had fired a series of shots at Trump there.