‘They were going to kill us’: Reporter claims he got ‘PTSD’ after Trump shooting because crowd blamed media

CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane claimed on a Wednesday podcast that he received a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis in the immediate aftermath of the July 13, 2024, Butler, PA, assassination attempt against President Donald Trump.

A gunman shot Trump in his right ear during his campaign rally in Butler, while killing a rally attendee and injuring others. On “The Chuck ToddCast,” MacFarlane said the crowd would have murdered the media covering the rally had Trump not risen “triumphantly” after getting shot.

WATCH:

“For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw an emerging America. And it wasn’t the shooting, Chuck. I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours,” MacFarlane told host Chuck Todd. “I got put on trauma leave. Not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you could — you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people. They were coming for us. If he didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us!”

MacFarlane said he was far from the only member of the media who covered the rally who felt this sentiment.

“Many of us on press row, as we talked about this on our text chains for weeks after, were quite confident we’d be dead if he didn’t get back up,” he said. “There was a subset — not everybody — there’s dozens of people in the crowd who started coming for us, saying, ‘You did this. This is your fault. You caused this. You killed him.’ And they’re going to beat us with their hands.”

“I mean, they were going to — they were going to kill us. And respectfully, the Secret Service had bigger issues than protecting us. When he jumped up triumphantly, it saved us,” he added. “But that’s the thing. I can’t eliminate from my mind’s eye the look in their faces. That’s what America is right now. It’s not rational. It’s an irrational thought to think the media shot somebody from atop a building.”

Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman, shot Trump from the roof of a building roughly 400 feet from where Trump was delivering his speech. The man Crooks killed was former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore, who died while shielding his family from gunfire.

CBS News did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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