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Veteran photojournalist Doug Mills won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for capturing a historic image of a bullet speeding past Donald Trump's head during an assassination attempt.
Veteran photojournalist Doug Mills of The New York Times has been awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his dramatic images of the July 2024 assassination attempt on President Donald Trump. The prestigious accolade honours a singular moment of journalistic excellence — a split-second photo of a bullet flying past Trump’s head, captured in stunning clarity during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
A Career of Political and Historic Moments
Doug Mills has been a senior photographer for The New York Times since 2002, with a focus on White House and political coverage. Over a four-decade career, Mills has documented some of the most pivotal moments in American politics.
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This marks the third Pulitzer Prize for Mills. He first received the honour in 1993 as part of a team for coverage of the Clinton/Gore campaign, and later for investigative reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In recent years, Mills was twice recognized with the Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage by Visual Journalists from the White House Correspondents' Association — once in 2020 and again in 2023.
Beyond politics, his lens has captured world-class sporting events, including the World Series, Super Bowls, and an impressive 16 Olympic Games.
Capturing the Bullet: A Moment of Reflex and Instinct
On July 13, 2024, during a Trump campaign rally, shots rang out — one of which struck the former president. Amid the chaos, Mills remained focused, snapping photos in rapid succession using his Sony a1 camera.
“I just happened to be down, shooting with a wide-angle lens just below the president when he was speaking,” Mills told Fox News during an interview at the Republican National Convention days after the incident. “There was a huge flag waving right above his head, and I just happened to be taking pictures at the same time.”
"Then, when I heard the pops, I guess I kept hitting on the shutter, and then I saw him reach for his [ear]. He grimaced and grabbed his hand and looked. It was blood, and then he went down, and I thought, 'Dear God, he's been shot,'" Mills recalled.
The Discovery of the Iconic Image
It wasn’t until later — while sending photos of Trump’s defiant fist pump to editors — that Mills stumbled upon the most striking image of his career.
"I was like, ‘Oh, hell. I remember taking pictures of him when this happened. Let me go back and look.’ I started looking at it. I started sending them right away, and I called one of the editors and said, ‘Please look at these really closely. This might have been near the moment where he was shot,’" Mills said.
"She called me back like five minutes later and said, 'You won't believe this.' She goes, ‘We actually see a bullet flying behind his head, and I was like, ’Oh my gosh.'"
That single frame — a bullet visibly speeding past Trump’s head mid-air — has since become one of the most historic images in recent political history, encapsulating the chaos and drama of that moment.
Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography
Moises Saman, a contributor to The New Yorker, also won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his haunting black-and-white photo series on Syria's Sednaya Prison, capturing the enduring trauma of Assad’s brutal torture chambers. The powerful series was published on December 30, 2024.
Full list of 2025 Pulitzer Prizes Journalism here
