The local attorney’s office put together the paperwork to charge the suspect, if investigations confirm he was the shooter. Further federal charges could be brought at a later date.
The incident immediately raised concerns about the level of security offered to Trump, even after an attempt on his life that almost succeeded in July.
After the first shooting, in which a bullet grazed Trump’s ear, the Secret Service faced severe criticism for its failure to prevent an assassin getting close enough to their “principal” to take a shot.
Ric Bradshaw, the Palm Beach County Sheriff, preempted concerns about the former president’s security team in a press conference on Sunday afternoon.
Describing the response as “fabulous”, he said that Floridians should “be proud of your law enforcement”.
“We started out with ‘we don’t know anything,’ to where we had a tag, we had a vehicle description, and we got an area where we saw the person,” he said.
But describing the scene on the golf course earlier in the afternoon, he acknowledged that the second assassination attempt had been almost as close as the first.
“When this gentleman was caught and stopped, [Trump was] probably between 300 and 500 yards [away],” he said. “But with a rifle and a scope like that, that’s not a long distance.”
A second attempt on Trump’s life, on a golf course he owns and uses regularly, will raise serious concerns that the Secret Service has not learned from the first assassination attempt.
After that attack, the Department of Homeland Security launched an immediate review into Trump’s security detail, and banned him from speaking outdoors without a bulletproof screen around him.
Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service director, resigned and the government issued statements attempting to reassure the public that the former president was safe.
But on Sunday afternoon, Mr Bradshaw acknowledged: “The security is what the Secret Service deems possible”.
“You’ve got to understand that the golf course is surrounded by shrubbery, so [if] someone gets into the shrubbery, they’re pretty much out of sight,” he said.
“At the level that he is right now, he’s not a sitting president. If he was, we would have had this whole golf course surrounded.”