President Donald Trump said in an interview clip released Thursday that he was “satisfied” with the investigation into the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt, but admitted that law enforcement there “had a bad day.”
Trump narrowly missed death during the 2024 presidential election cycle when a shooter at a Butler rally snuck through the president’s defenses and took a shot that could’ve been lethal to the president, but instead grazed his ear.
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“So there were mistakes made, and that shouldn’t have happened,” he told his daughter-in-law Lara Trump on Fox News. “And that building was a prime building in terms of what they were trying to do, but I was satisfied in terms of the bigger plot, the larger plot, I was satisfied. And, you know, great confidence in these people. I know the people, and they’re very talented, very capable. They had a bad day.”
The assassination attempt resulted in the resignation of then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle for security failures that day. Law enforcement mistakenly allowed Thomas Matthew Crooks to climb up on a nearby rooftop, after surveying the area with a drone, and take several shots at Trump. None of the shots significantly injured the president, but did kill firefighter Corey Comperatore and injure several others.
Sean Curran, who shielded Trump at the Butler rally, is now the Secret Service Director.
A House task force on the assassination attempt found in December 2024, “significant failures in the planning, execution, and leadership of the Secret Service and its law enforcement partners.”
“The failures that led to the tragic events of July 13 were not entirely isolated to the campaign event itself, or the days preceding it,” the report says. “Preexisting issues in leadership and training created an environment in which the specific failures identified above could occur. Secret Service personnel with little to no experience in advance planning roles were given significant responsibility, despite the July 13 event being held at a higher-risk outdoor venue with many line-of-sight issues, in addition to specific intelligence about a long-range threat. Further, some of the Secret Service agents in significant advance planning roles did not clearly understand the delineation of their responsibilities.”
Crooks was shot dead shortly after he fired his first shots. Little has been found to indicate the then-20-year-old’s motivation for the shooting. His family noted that his mental health had been declining in the year before the shooting.
Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, said in May that there was no “big, explosive there there.” He added, “If it was there, we would have told you.”
The shooting’s consequences have continued. Six Secret Service agents have been suspended without pay in connection with the assassination attempt. An independent Department of Homeland Security review on the shooting criticized the Secret Service.
“The Secret Service does not perform at the elite levels needed to discharge its critical mission,” the report found. “The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static even though risks have multiplied and technology has evolved.”
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The shooting’s first anniversary is this weekend. Trump has acknowledged that without an immigration chart that he tilted his head toward, he would not be alive.
The shooting was the first of two notable assassination attempts on the president. The second came from Ryan Routh, who crept around near his West Palm Beach golf club with a rifle before Secret Service agents spotted him and chased him off before his arrest. He’s now being prosecuted for the attempt.