ABC News’ Jonathan Karl dove into the details he found in a “treasure trove of information” around the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump at a campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year.The journalist told hosts of “The View” on Tuesday that raw evidence and sworn interviews with Secret Service agents included in a report released by Congress allowed him to reconstruct “minute by minute what was going on” July 13, 2024. “When he gets to the hospital, I found out, when he gets to the hospital, his aides, he comes out, the aides are in other cars, as he comes in ... the handful of aides are there and he says, ‘How is it playing? How does it look on TV?’ That was his first thought,” Karl said as he promoted his new book, “Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America.”The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, struck Trump in the ear and wounded three attendees — one fatally. Crooks was shot and killed by a Secret Service agent. Karl described the moments immediately after the shooting, as agents were trying to get the president to safety inside an armored SUV. Trump “fights them, and he gets out” to do the photographed fist pump and shouts “fight,” he said. Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is surrounded by Secret Service agents after an assassination attempt July 13, 2024, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.via Associated Press“Think about that,” Karl said. “They don’t know if there’s another shooter, and he’s now exposing himself to the television cameras and capturing that moment, but also to another potential shooter.”Karl called it Trump’s “personal finest moment,” despite Secret Service agents writing that his actions were a “violation of everything they had been trained to do.”Trump told the Washington Examiner he pumped his fist as a message to his supporters at the rally, letting them know he was all right and “America goes on, we go forward, that we are strong.” “The energy coming from the people there in that moment, they just stood there,” he told the newspaper. “It’s hard to describe what that felt like, but I knew the world was looking. I knew that history would judge this, and I knew I had to let them know we are OK.”The resulting photo, Karl said, “defines his campaign.”Close