When a bullet flew by Donald Trump’s ear at a speed near 2,000mph, it was not clear to Doug Mills, who was standing a few feet away taking photographs, that he had just captured one of the most remarkable images of the 21st century.
In that instant, as the shutter clicked on his Sony A1 camera at 20 frames per second, the New York Times lensman once described by Trump as a “genius” unwittingly captured the round fired by the suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks. The shot, from an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, showed as a streak of white smoke against the blue sky to the president’s left.
“Oh my gosh, you won’t believe it, you got the bullet flying past his head,” his photo editor told him over the phone as she worked through the hundreds of images sent directly from his camera. “I said, ‘What?’” Mills recalled. “When I had my laptop later and saw them I said something to the effect of ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t f***ing believe it’.”
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He was feet from the stage when the drama unfolded and — along with colleagues — continued standing and snapping images as members of the crowd dived for cover, Secret Service agents piled on top of the prone ex-president and a Swat team with assault weapons staked out the stage.
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“I hope I get the right shot. I hope I don’t get shot myself,” Mills told himself.
The veteran photographer recalled advice from a legendary colleague, Ron Edmonds of the Associated Press, who captured the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981. “I’d talked to him several times about what was going through his mind, how he reacted … he always said, ‘I never wait, I always move forward.’ I don’t know if that’s the instinct I had and that it was instilled in me, but yesterday I did the same thing.
“His [Trump’s] staff were yelling at me, ‘Doug, get down, get down, get down.’ The Secret Service: ‘Get down, get down.’ Then the counter-sniper jumped on stage with a long rifle and I thought, ‘Should I get down?’ But recording history — that’s my job.”
He added: “I’ve had more text messages and phone calls than I can count, saying, ‘You really captured history here Mills, be proud of what you did, you didn’t flinch.’ That means a lot coming from colleagues. I was in the right place at the right time and I’ve always thought it’s more about being lucky than good. And I was sure as hell lucky.”
Mills, 64, has covered the White House beat since 1983, working there first as chief photographer for the Associated Press (AP) and for The New York Times since 2002.
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He has long been Trump’s favourite press photographer, despite the former president having often targeted the prestigious publication for which he works as an “enemy of the people”. In 2018 the publisher of The New York Times urged Trump to cease his false allegations that the newspaper and others were peddling “fake news”, warning that his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric” was undermining America’s constitutional commitment to a free press and freedom of speech.
“He’s the number one photographer in the world,” Trump told Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, during the G7 summit in Quebec in 2018, pointing out Mills in the crowd. “Unfortunately, he works for The New York Times.”
Trump has also referred to him as “my genius photographer”, regularly remarks upon his professionalism behind the lens and, after singling him out of the media pack for a close-up during his historic meeting in 2019 with Kim Jong-un, asked for prints afterwards — both for himself and the North Korean president.
“He’s also called me out before when he sees a picture he doesn’t like and I say, ‘Sir, it is what it is, that’s how it was,’” Mills said. “To see him yesterday so vulnerable and shocked and being lifted up and held up by the Secret Service, my first reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s alive, it’s OK.’
“Then seeing his face very shaken, so shocked, so pale, then immediately being defiant — like ‘this isn’t going to stop me’ and that fist bump I’ve seen before but never with that grit to his teeth and never with blood on his face … frankly I was shocked and devastated.
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“I’ve been covering presidents for 40 years and bullets and guns shouldn’t be any part of our political theatre. It’s senseless. An innocent person was killed yesterday.”
Evan Vucci, a photographer working for the Associated Press, had been with Mills in the “buffer zone”, a media area between the stage and the crowd, when the “pop pop pop” of gunfire rang out. He too kept his finger on the shutter while all around him was mayhem, recording images now hailed as moments in history.
“I turned my lens to the stage and saw the Secret Service agents all on top of him … I’m thinking, ‘How are they going to get him out of here?’ and the most likely scenario was on the other side of the stage into the SUV,” Vucci said. “I’m sprinting to the other side of the stage and that’s when the president stood up.
“I’m telling myself, ‘Slow down, compose, make photos, don’t just go for the motor drive. This is an important moment in American history that has to be documented and I just need to do the best shot I can.’ I was just happy I did my part in that. My job is take the viewer into my lens and show them what I’m seeing.”
Vucci, 47, has worked for the AP for 31 years, covering news and sport from Washington to Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is going to sound completely silly but it’s a true thing,” he said. “I work for a company with a long, rich history of strong photojournalism and I’m proud that when it was my turn, I kept the standard.”
