Fox News was carrying Donald Trump‘s rally in Butler, PA, live at 6:11 p.m. ET when suddenly, chaos ensued as the former president grabbed his ear, then plunged to the ground and Secret Service pounced on top of him for protection.
Shannon Bream, the host of Fox News Sunday and legal correspondent, had been in Milwaukee, anchoring in the lead up to the rally, and was still in the chair as she watched on a monitor what was unfolding.
“We had just tossed to the live rally, and we all stayed in place just to be ready for any kind of coverage wrapping out of the rally, and very quickly, as I was sitting there just maybe five, six minutes into the speech, I heard some popping,” Bream told Deadline in an interview today. “I saw the president go behind the podium. I heard screaming, and just motioned to all of us who were still there in coverage mode, ‘Wait a minute, what’s happening? What’s happening?’ Because we had all kind of taken just a little bit of a breather.”
Producers were telling her in her earpiece, ‘We got to take this live.”
At about 6:12 p.m. ET, forty-four seconds after the first popping sounds were heard, Bream came on the air and told viewers, “OK, we are watching live at a rally in Butler, PA, where former President Trump was speaking on stage. There has been some kind of disturbance that clearly sent law enforcement and Secret Service into motion, immediately jumping around the former president in a protective mode.”
At that point, Trump was still on the ground and shielded by Secret Service agents.
Bream then told viewers, “This does not look good. I’m going to be honest with you, from what we can see right here, it looks like they are attempting to movie him out, that he may have been injured.” Trump then got up and raised his fist in the air before he was ushered into an SUV and whisked away. Bream soon after went to Alexis McAdams, the Fox News correspondent who was at the rally.
“You just try to be as measured as possible, because you see things happen very quickly,” Bream told Deadline of the moment.
She said that when the chaotic situation started to unfold, her “first thought was, ‘Just try to stay calm. I mean, my heart was pounding out of my chest, it felt like in those first few moments, but I knew we couldn’t rely on our emotions or what we had seen just very quickly. We needed to give it time to settle, to find out what his condition was, to rewatch that video and have another look with a few minutes of calming down. So the thought was, ‘Let’s just say what we know. Let’s keep the tone calm.’ This is shocking for everybody who is watching it. It’s a shock to the country, and let’s just take a breath.”
Bream said that only a little bit later, when they got a couple of witnesses on the phone, including a firearms owner, could they say that it appeared that shots were heard. “At the beginning, we have to assume we don’t know what we don’t know,” she said. “It’s telling people what we have seen, what we can verify, and as we play that tape back, and sticking to that. It’s very easy when your heart is pounding, when you are emotional, to want to try to figure out what’s happening and describe it as quickly as you can, but keeping your head about you is the most important thing.”
She said that as she was watching what was happening, she was particularly struck by the still photographers at the base of the rally stage, holding up their cameras and trying to get pictures, “knowing they probably weren’t sure what they were going to capture at that moment. …I remember thinking it was very gutsy of them to be doing their jobs and capturing this moment in history. And we’re always worried about all of the crews who are in the middle of these potentially dangerous situations.”
Bill Hemmer joined Bream on the air. Only when she got off the air about four hours later did she see that she had dozens of texts from friends and family saying, “We’re praying for you. Just stay calm, and I really attribute their prayers to helping me be able to just be steady.”
Security in Milwaukee, the site of the Republican convention, already was tight, but “definitely went to another level today,” Bream said.
She added, “I think everybody is more than willing to put up with the delays in the additional screenings because that’s just the moment we are at in history. This place was blanketed before, but we have new barriers up today, and I would assume that will continue to increase every day until we get to the big speeches of the vice presidential nominee Wednesday, the former president being on stage on Thursday, and so we just have to go with the flow.”