Zito weaves the harrowing events of that day into a broader story about the transformation of the Rust Belt and Trump’s historic political comeback.
S alena Zito, who has been chronicling the politics of the Rust Belt for decades, was directly in front of the stage on that fateful day in July 2024 when Donald Trump was shot. In her new book out this week, Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland, Zito weaves the harrowing events of that day into a broader story about the transformation of the Rust Belt and Trump’s historic political comeback.
Editor’s Note: The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
NR: The scene of President Trump getting shot last July in Butler, coming to his feet, raising his fist in the air, and yelling “Fight!” instantly became one of the most iconic moments in American history. You were as close as you could get to Trump at that moment without being on stage. Can you describe where you were and what you witnessed, and specifically, what people who have only seen the video clip might have missed about the moment?
ZITO: So I was about four feet from the president. I was in an area that’s called the buffer. It’s traditionally just for security and photojournalists. There’s traditionally not a reporter in that area, but I was going to travel with him that day to Bedminster and do an interview. And so that’s why I was there. Some of the things I think that people miss that still stand out to me today is when the [illegal immigration] chart came down. If anybody has ever gone to a Trump rally, that’s not something that ever happened. I remember thinking in that moment, “My goodness, is he Ross Perot? Like, why? Why is he having a chart come down?” And in that same moment, he does something he also never does. He turns away with his neck, not his body, but with his neck to face the chart. Now, if you’ve ever gone to a Trump rally, that is not part of what he does — he is always facing the rally goers. The relationship between someone attending his rally and him is very transactional, very emotional, and so for him to turn away, I remember thinking in the moment, “What is he doing?” And it was in that moment that I heard “pop, pop, pop,” and I knew immediately that it was gunshots, because I’m a gun owner, and there are a lot of people I could hear saying, “Why are there firecrackers?” And I didn’t get down in that moment, I watched everything sort of play out in front of me.
And when they say things happen in slow motion, when there’s a traumatic event, it really does happen in slow motion. I watched the Secret Service sort of surround him in a sea of blue, and I heard the second shots fire off. I knew he was at least okay, because he didn’t fall down. He knelt down and one of the things that stands out to me, that I don’t think people heard was — as he finally got his shoes on, that was something he was very insistent about, that they put his shoes on before they moved him out of the stage, from my vantage point, it looked like they knocked them off of him when they surrounded him — and I hear him say, as he’s about to stand up, before he said “Fight! Fight! Fight!” he said “U-S-A!” And I asked him about that the next day. And it’s a really emotional part of the book that really shows a different side of Trump that I don’t think people have seen before, and I’m not sure they always have seen since that, but he was very cognizant that it was important to him to not have people panic, and I don’t want to go into too much detail, because I think it’s an important part of the book, but that was a very significant moment for him, as someone who would go on to become president of the United States again.
NR: You’ve had a lot of conversations with Trump over the years, and you talk about how the assassination attempt profoundly changed him, but in what way? Because to a lot of us observing things from the outside, we see sort of the same old Trump after maybe the initial aftermath, the early stages of the RNC speech, but otherwise, he seems just as vicious to his opponents and so forth. In what ways do you think the event changed him?
ZITO: I think there’s a moment when he talks about the “hand of God.” From the outset, people don’t think of Trump as someone who is deeply or profoundly religious, right? He doesn’t express it in a way that George W. Bush did or Jimmy Carter did, but he has this recognition that, in that moment and from that moment on, God was watching him, and that there was a reason that he didn’t die in that moment. There was a reason that he made the decisions that he did, decisions he never normally makes. . . . From the outside, you don’t necessarily see that, especially if you’re a critic of him, it’s very difficult for people to wrap their head around who he is, because he’s just [Trump] to them. As you said, very much the same person, but [he’s changed] even in the way that he handles the urgency of what he wants to accomplish. It goes back to those early conversations that he and I had right after he was shot — he called me the next morning, bright and early in the morning, probably several times that day — that he believes that he is supposed to accomplish things for the betterment of the country, that he is on a mission to do as much as he can because he was saved in that moment.
NR: What’s great about your book is that it isn’t just about the assassination attempt, but about Butler as a place and the current moment in America more broadly. You write about how reporters often describe the disconnect between those in “flyover country” and the so-called coastal elites, but you note that there’s a more complicated distinction involving rootedness. [See book excerpt here.] Can you talk about this distinction and how Butler itself fits into this?
ZITO: Yeah, so in this country, there tend to be people who are rooted, who have a keen sense of “place,” that have been — and their families have been — from the same 50 miles, right? That is where they’re from, and they’re deeply connected to it, not just physically, but emotionally. And then there are people that are more transient, right? And they tend to be the people that move up and out. And there’s a perception among the people that move up and out that the people that stay behind are resentful. But it’s very much not the case. I mean, sure, there are people that feel stuck, but there are also more people that feel very happy in the choices that they’ve made, staying where they’re from.
It’s more and more so when I look at our profession, journalism. Most journalists, not all, but most journalists live in what I call the “super zip codes” in this country. And that doesn’t make them bad. That just makes them different from the people that they often cover, and they’re at odds because they don’t understand and know each other. People — and it’s not just our profession, it’s not just legacy media — it is our corporations, our institutions, academia, Hollywood, entertainment, and all of those cultural curators. Their headquarters and their boardrooms are often located in those super zip codes. And they all went to the same kinds of schools, and they all live in the same neighborhoods, and they all socialized with each other.
Again, that’s not bad, but when they are covering people that have very different experiences, they don’t understand who they’re covering. They often don’t know anyone that owns a gun, or sits in a pew every week, or went to a state school. And because they’re at odds with each other, the covering of them has become more of an anthropological exercise, as opposed to understanding their rootedness. . . . I think the statistic is eight out of ten people in Pennsylvania live within 100 miles of where they grew up. And these are people that just don’t leave, and it’s not because they’re dumb or they’re not smart, or they lack ambition. They just feel more rewarded by having that close proximity to family and experiences and tradition. Does that make sense?
NR: Yes. And specifically, how would you say this relates to Butler?
ZITO: So Butler is a county where, I believe, eight out of 10 people live within four miles of where they grew up. This is a very rooted county and people, and it’s not heavily populated, but it is very interesting and dynamic. . . . You have working-class [residents], you have farmers, you have immigrants, and you have $2 million suburbanites, and almost all of them have stayed in Butler or came back to Butler. So they’re very, very rooted to the place they’re from. This is a place that presidents don’t come to. Now, presidents have come to Butler before they were president, before they thought about running, or after they were president, but not to campaign. Only two presidents have ever campaigned there, and that was John F. Kennedy, and the other was Donald Trump. It’s just one of those places that is very overlooked by politicians, but also by legacy media. You just don’t go to Butler.
NR: If we flash back to November 2022, Trump’s standing within the party was much different than it is now. At the time, Republicans blamed him for underperformance in the midterms, and Ron DeSantis, coming off of a huge victory, was ascendant. It’s become popular for a lot of political reporters, including myself, to attribute Trump’s comeback to primary voters rallying around him after the string of indictments the following spring. But you actually identify the turning point for him as his appearance in East Palestine, Ohio, after the train derailment. Why is that?
ZITO: East Palestine was definitely the turning point. That was his inflection point. And, yes, did the indictments bolster his sort of legendary status among Republican voters? Of course they did. But if you went into February of 2023, that’s when he was at his lowest point in the polling in New Hampshire. I’m going to forget when that New Hampshire poll came out . . . showing him and DeSantis neck and neck. In fact, I think that DeSantis was ahead. [Editor’s Note: On January 26, 2023, the University of New Hampshire released a poll showing DeSantis with a 12-point lead in the state]. And Trump shows up in East Palestine, Ohio. It is sleet outside. He has galoshes on. He’s walking in a trench coat. He’s walking in, God knows what. Because nobody knew what was going on there, right? We didn’t know what was in the air. I know I had been covering it, and every time I came home, I came home with a headache and not feeling well. But he’s walking around that town talking to people, listening to people. He shows up with an 18-wheeler filled with bottled water, and he buys half the town McDonald’s, and he says something really, really important. He talks about the dignity of these people, and he talks about seeing them, and he won’t forget them.
I thought he was off between November 2022 and until that moment. I didn’t think he had that thing that people loved about him. But when he did that, I was like, “Oh, it’s over. If he pulls ahead in the polls, and within the next week or two, it’s over. And it’s because of what’s happened here.” There are 42 miles that separate East Palestine and Butler — coincidentally, towns that my family came from. My great-grandfather was from East Palestine, Ohio. My great-great-great-great grandfather was one of the founding families of Butler. Those 42 miles, there were stretches of 42 miles like that all across the country. And those were the people that were going to put Trump into office, and that was the pivot moment. I didn’t just think he was going to win the primary in that moment. I thought he was going to win the election in that moment.
NR: The Rust Belt changed dramatically between the time when Barack Obama comfortably beat John McCain in Pennsylvania in 2008 and Trump’s victory eight years later. How much of this is owed to Trump’s ability to connect to those voters, and how much is due to broader factors that may prove more enduring even beyond Trump?
So the disassociation with the Democrats, between the Democrat voters — the Rust Belt voters in places like Mahoning County and places like Johnstown, Cambria County, Luzerne, Erie — began between 2008 and 2012 if you look at their votes. If you look specifically at Pennsylvania, Barack Obama lost almost five percentage points between those two election cycles. But those voters didn’t go to Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney did not win them over. He didn’t speak directly to them. He didn’t tell them, “I see your pain.” People looked at him and said, “That’s a nice guy, but if my plant closes down, he’s the guy that’s going to bring the box to my desk and walk me out.” When Trump came down that escalator in 2015, and everybody talked about whatever he said about Mexico, all I heard was that he talked about the dignity of work. He essentially gave Bill Clinton’s announcement speech in October 1991. So it’s in part that the Democrats let these voters know where to go, and a bigger part [is] that Trump saw them and told them, “I see you. I respect what you do. You are my people. Come with me.” You know, why not? I mean, he basically said, “Why not? Nothing else has worked.”
NR: You write toward the end that there will be a never be another one like Trump. If you consider the Trump phenomenon — the policy ideas and the general populist sentiment and trying to speak to people who have been forgotten — you could see somebody picking up that mold. JD Vance being the most obvious. But there’s also Trump, the celebrity, the performer, the guy who’s going to have everybody suddenly debating whether we should take over Greenland. What does the MAGA movement look like without Trump? And will it continue to dominate the Republican Party?
ZITO: I think that’s up to whoever takes over the mantle. And as to your point, it more than likely is JD Vance or Marco Rubio or a combination of both. And you see it with Vance in his ability to go on these podcasts and be both very wonky and policy-driven but also sort of funny and edgy and a little Millennial. So there’s an opportunity for that to continue. But Trump, whether you like him or not, you cannot dispute that he is a force of nature. And it’s unlikely there will ever be anyone else like him, at least in my lifetime.
NR: Is there anything that you’d want to add that you think that people should know about your book?
ZITO: Well, I think what’s really important about this book is that it is a really granular look at the 2024 election on the ground and seeing what Democrats kept missing and what reporters struggled to define and wrap their heads around. If you were with me in Pennsylvania — and there were plenty of local Democrats that I talked to every day — it would be clear to you that neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris was going to win the state. And you could also see how much the coalition was just changing right in front of everyone. I can remember there was a rally. I think it was Lehigh Valley, right after Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. And this was a heavily Puerto Rican community in Pennsylvania. And everyone was writing like, “Oh, you know, he called them garbage, or he let someone call them garbage, and he’s going to lose the Puerto Rican vote.” And I remember getting there early in the morning, and they said there’s going to be this big rally against him now, but there’s six people there. And every Puerto Rican family and business owner that I’m talking to thinks that people have lost their minds, that they can’t even get a joke. And I remember being so frustrated that nobody else saw what I saw, I remember that being incredibly frustrating. So that’s what I wanted to bring to life in the rest of that book, to see it through people’s lives and people’s eyes — what was happening. So maybe they can treat these people who have moved their political affiliation with more respect and more recognition.