CNN reporter Alayna Treene covers Donald Trump and was at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when shots rang out on Saturday. She spoke with CNN’s Zachary Wolf about what she saw.
TREENE: It was honestly going to be a typical rally, like any other. I have now been to – I can’t even count, upwards of 20 – the majority of Donald Trump’s rallies since he launched his third bid, and it was a scene like any other.
There’s so much security presence.
People often remark, ‘Oh, you have to be safe, be careful.’ And I often feel like being in a rally is one of the safest places, because there’s always so much Secret Service. There’s local law enforcement on the ground. You have to go through several mags (magnetometers). They have very limited options of what you can bring in. With CNN, we get security for ourselves as well, just given the divisive nature of the politics right now. So it was remarkable to me to see what had happened.
When the shots went off, we were on the riser. We’re in the middle of the crowd. There’s normally a large crowd, and then we’re above them. The risers are elevated. We’re over 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 right at the top of 6 p.m. and had begun listening to Donald Trump. Then, a couple minutes into his speech is when we had heard the pop, pop, pop. From my vantage point, it was to the left side of the stage. It was off of 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, like, ‘What was that?’
And you could see Donald Trump. He was referencing a graphic showing some border numbers during his administration. And you could see him, his face looking in that direction as well, like, ‘What was that?’ before he touched his ear and dropped to the ground.
From one direction of the stage, off to his right, was where we could hear the gunshots. But then, on the left side of the stage, there was a green tractor, and after the first round of the gunshots, of the bangs that we had heard, I believe that it had hit the tractor or something on the tractor, because immediately there was this cloud. All the steam came out from the other side, the opposite side of the stage. When I talked to people on the ground, they had said that they believed that the bullets had hit something in the truck that made the steam go off.
At first I remember being like, ‘Is this part of the program? What’s happening?’
And then, of course, we heard everyone screaming. Immediately, it went into absolute chaos. Secret Service telling us to get down on the ground. My security guard came up onto the riser and grabbed me. He said we need to get under the risers and pulled me under there, and essentially threw me on the ground and then put his body on top of mine. And I remember, I was like, I need to get up and see what’s happening. But he was holding me and other people around me down, just saying, we can’t move. Stay down. Stay down. And then we could see people started cheering, and I peeked out from under the risers. And that’s when Donald Trump had been starting to stand up with Secret Service around him and putting his fist in the air and being escorted off the stage. And that’s when we crawled back out, and I went back on the risers to figure out what was happening and what to do next.
When interviewing several of the attendees, many of whom were on the bleachers behind him, some who were in one of the very front rows, they had no idea what was going on. Everyone was stunned, including myself. I don’t think anyone had ever expected something like that to happen.
I was talking with my producer earlier today. Sometimes you go to these rallies, you go to so many, it’s the same thing. You’re just waiting to hear what Donald Trump has to say. But never in a million years would we have expected an assassination attempt like that. It’s just something that I don’t think would ever cross our minds, because you always feel so protected with the amount of law enforcement and Secret Service on the ground. Everyone I spoke with who was there, including the people on the bleachers behind them, they had no idea.
The venue was inside these fairgrounds, all grass. You had the large crowd, the press pen with the risers was in the middle of the crowd, and then you had the stage in front of us. But there was a fence, a chain link fence, surrounding all of it, keeping the rally inside. 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, shots broke out shortly after that.
But the people I talked to who were behind him, they had a similar reaction to me, which was, ‘Could it have been fireworks?’
I interviewed one man, Joseph Meyn, he said the same thing. At first he thought it could be fireworks. ‘Could this be part of the program?’ One woman I spoke with today — her name was Renee — she was saying she was directly behind Donald Trump, on the stands behind him, and she had said she didn’t really understand what was happening until she saw Donald Trump go down. And that’s when she thought, ‘Oh, wow, you have to get down. Something really bad is happening.’
Harrowing details of the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump
Immediately after, I went back onto the risers. Everyone’s disoriented. People are screaming in the crowd. We went live, basically immediately. I started talking to Wolf Blitzer. A couple of minutes later, Secret Service just started pushing everybody out, unplugging our equipment and screaming at everyone, ‘You’ve got to get out of here. You got to exit the venue. This is an active crime scene.’
They came up to the press, started to tell us we needed to go. Started to pull some of us away and pull us down. (Phone) service also got jammed completely. So at one point we were told that they started to jam all of the towers for all the service. So we couldn’t call anybody. We weren’t sure how to get in contact with DC. Obviously, that was my first goal, when I was just thinking about what to do. But eventually we just started walking out.
A lot of the rally attendees were very angry with the press. When I was still on stage, people were screaming at us, saying, ‘This is your fault.’ I think that they were really seeking an outlet for their anger, and at a Trump rally, Donald Trump often talks about “fake news.” A lot of people yell at us all the time. That’s why we normally bring security. So it was a heightened version of that.
We went outside the way that we had come in, and they closed down the parking lot as well. So everyone was trying to get into their cars and leave the site, but they couldn’t. People were stuck in their cars for over an hour, maybe two or three hours, and we did some live shots, but then also we realized people aren’t moving, they’re here. So we just started walking around and saying, ‘Hi, would you mind doing an interview with us? We’d love to talk about your experience and everyone in those moments.’
Most people felt that they wanted to share what they had seen and what they had felt. And so that’s how those came about.
Later Saturday evening, we had seen videos circulating on social media of where the suspected shooter was located and ultimately killed by counter snipers. Given we could not exit the rally area by vehicle, we ran over on foot with our equipment. We were the only camera crew that I saw, at least at that time, who had set up in front of the building.
I spotted at least a dozen police cars, some from the sheriff’s department, others state troopers, cordoning off the building. One officer later that evening had confirmed it was where the shooter had fired a series of bullets toward Trump.
