Doug Mills of The New York Times
Doug Mills of The New York Times accepts the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. (David Dini/The Pulitzer Prizes)
Winning Work
The photo shows a bullet streaking past Trump’s head, an extraordinary image that captured the precise moment of danger on perhaps the most dramatic day of an extraordinary political year. Michael Harrigan, a retired FBI special agent who spent 22 years in the bureau, confirmed that the image appeared to be the path of a bullet. “It absolutely could be showing the displacement of air due to a projectile,” said Harrigan. “Given the circumstances, if that’s not showing the bullet’s path through the air, I don’t know what else it would be.”
A fraction of a moment later, Trump reacted to the sting of the bullet that grazed his ear and instinctively reached up with his right hand.
Trump pulled back his hand to reveal blood from his wound.
After the attempted assassin opened fire, the agents in Trump’s Secret Service detail rushed to cover him and protect him from any further shots. A member of the Secret Service countersniper team took point on stage, searching the horizon for the shooter and any other possible threats.
When the agents began evacuating the wounded Trump offstage to safety, he briefly stopped them and insisted on gesturing to the crowd of supporters. Raising his fist, he defiantly shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” It was a moment of instinct that would later be capitalized on by his campaign and embraced by his supporters.
But just a moment later, his face transformed, going blank and pale, almost as if he seemed to suddenly grasp what had just happened. His agents were later criticized for allowing him to be so visible as he was being rushed from the stage, exposed to any potential further gunshots.
Trump’s bloody ear is seen in this photo as the agents move him away from the scene. One agent arcs his arm overhead to reduce the visibility of the former president in case more shots are fired.
The aftermath of the scene evokes the notion of democracy disrupted—a campaign scene with a flag still flying overhead but emptied of the crowd after one supporter was killed and two others were injured by the gunfire of a would-be assassin.
Biography
Doug Mills has worked as a photographer in the Washington bureau of The New York Times since 2002. Previously, Mr. Mills served for 15 years as chief photographer for The Associated Press in Washington. He joined The A.P. after working four years in the Washington bureau of United Press International.
Mr. Mills won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1993 with The A.P. for team coverage of the Clinton/Gore campaign and won a second Pulitzer Prize for photography with The A.P. for its team investigative coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. Mr. Mills has also won numerous awards from the White House News Photographers Association.
Born in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960, Mr. Mills studied at Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria, Va.