Why Trump Made His Fateful Trip to Butler

In an excerpt from her new book, journalist Salena Zito, an eyewitness to the near assassination, writes about the importance of place in American politics.

Excerpted from Butler, by Salena Zito (copyright 2025). Used with permission from Center Street, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 

D espite a rich history and newfound affluence at the county line, Butler County rarely has been a place where candidates for U.S. president have campaigned to ask people for their votes.

Only two candidates — Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Republican nominee Donald J. Trump in 2020 and 2024 — have done so. In fact, Trump is the only sitting U.S. president to visit the county in its 224-year history.

Yes, James Buchanan and James Garfield came, but that was well before they had even considered running for president. William Howard Taft came as well, long after he had been president.

When Trump announced in October 2020 that he would be holding a rally here, I remember that it triggered some confusion among Democrats, Republicans, political strategists, and members of the news media.

Why in God’s name was he going to Butler?

My reaction was different. Very different. To me, the decision was brilliant, largely because of what I noted earlier: the importance of a sense of place. I often write about “place” in politics because place matters. However, most Democrats and Republicans who make their living in Washington, D.C., rarely get that. If they did, their candidates would win more often.

What is “place”? Rootedness.

And, for that matter, most reporters would better understand what and whom to cover in today’s politics and, more important, where to cover events, if they understood the importance of place. By definition, a successful reporter in today’s Washington- and New York–centric American journalism is placeless. These reporters cover politics with a worldview that comes from a lack of rootedness. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is restrictive in that they often do not understand the people they cover in politics — why they think the way they do and do the things they do. Many reporters do not understand why never leaving one’s hometown is not viewed as a bad thing and instead is honored as an achievement by family and peers. They do not understand the value of living close enough to your family to have supper together on Sundays, something that those who are rooted typically do.

And they don’t know how to cover these voters because they don’t know anyone like them in their own social circles.

Reporters often write about the contrast between coastal elites and the country’s “fly-over” areas, but the difference is more complicated. The dichotomy isn’t necessarily rural versus urban, or low-density versus high-density areas of America, as Tom Maraffa, professor emeritus of geography at Youngstown State University, once told me. The difference is more between the “placed” and “placeless.” In short, people who are rooted in their places versus people who are essentially nomads, like reporters and politicos who flock to Washington and New York not just to make a living but also to form policy or political messages.

These professionals — placeless people who share no affinity for rootedness to their hometowns — are often highly critical of fly-over folks and develop an affinity for ideology and abstractions as opposed to neighborhoods and cities.

As I noted in a story I wrote for the Washington Examiner in 2018 about the placed and the placeless, the lives of the coastal elites, academics, big-business owners, high-tech innovators, entertainers, and media personalities — those I call our cultural curators — have led to this lack of affinity because they are so mobile.

People who live in Butler are generally not so mobile. It’s not because they are stuck; their lack of mobility, or their desire to live in their hometown near family, friends, and traditions, is purposeful.

People in small towns, rural areas, and affluent areas of Butler have been tied to their places for generations. This is why issues such as climate change and globalization are fundamentally viewed differently, including among the college-educated in Butler.

The placeless think of global policies, abstract efficiencies, and lofty ideas like social justice. The placed think of how things will affect their neighborhood, town, or city.

Maraffa told me, “People who voted for Trump share a rootedness in place. Think of people in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy or the TV series Justified, which was tied by the phrase ‘We dug coal together,’ an expression of place.”

So when Trump decided to hold a rally in Butler, the placeless in the media and a lot of “very smart” people in the Republican and Democratic Parties did not recognize the importance of place in American politics.

What they missed was that Butler is many things to many people — and people all over the country would see themselves in that rally — bucolic, industrious, suburban, and historic, filled with rolling hills of farmland, a college town, a roaring steel mill, and that all-important outpost of suburban Pittsburghers who brought with them prosperity and commerce.

Why come here? Butler is reliably Republican. It isn’t going to swing the election and would not swing an election cycle. But for practical purposes, it makes sense: Butler has an airport, it’s located within the media markets of both Pittsburgh and Erie County, another important place for politics, and it is situated just over the state line with Ohio.

It is the nuance that is missed, though, and it is both complicated and important: Butler matters because it represents so much more than Butler. There are people across the country who are much the same, people who work with their hands, work the land, and even work in C-suites. Perhaps they could make more money elsewhere, but they decided to stay near their hometown because they were tied to the region and that had more value to them than money.

Because those who value place are skeptical toward certain policies, they’re often accused of ignorance, racism, and denialism — all lazy tropes that reporters or Democrats use because they would never dream of thinking about how the policies they champion affect their places.

Trump’s 2020 event was held on Halloween night at Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport, and the number of people who attended was unprecedented. The best way to describe the line of cars waiting to get into the rally is to visualize the scene at the end of the movie Field of Dreams, where hundreds of cars approach the field, fulfilling the prophecy that people will come to watch baseball.

The crowd was the largest Trump would draw.

Three days later, he would lose the state and the election — and then things would get really dark.

Two years later, Trump would return to Pennsylvania to campaign for Mehmet Oz, his handpicked candidate for U.S. Senate, a decision that divided Republicans. When Trump declared his intention to run again in 2024, the response to the announcement lacked the spectacle to which he was accustomed.

A few days after Trump’s announcement, Oz lost his Senate race to Democrat John Fetterman. Other candidates Trump had endorsed in Republican primaries, including Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Adam Laxalt in Nevada also lost, and Republicans began to sour on the former president.

His popularity dropped in the polls while that of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rose. DeSantis had scored a historic win in Florida that November, not only for himself but also for candidates down-ballot, with wins for Republicans in districts and seats the party had never won before. As a result, the Republican electorate shifted its attention to DeSantis.

Trump responded to that shift by taking swipes at the Florida governor almost daily on social media, calling DeSantis “DeSanc-timonious.” By January of 2023, the esteemed New Hampshire University poll showed Trump was garnering only 30 percent of the New Hampshire electorate vote to DeSantis’s 42 percent in the country’s first primary state.

Trump had never been so far down in the eyes of the Republican primary voter. Many were still trying to recover from the events of January 6, 2021, still bruised about losing the U.S. Senate majority in the midterm elections a few months earlier, and they just wanted a winner to lead their party.

Trump was sharing so many personal grievances, he reminded voters of the celebration of Festivus from the 1997 Seinfeld episode “The Strike.” According to the sitcom, Festivus is a day when everyone has a chance to air their grievances. But for Trump, Festivus was starting to become a daily occurrence.

Within 23 days of that New Hampshire University poll, Trump began to claw his way back into the hearts of Republican voters by showing up at a little village 42 miles from Butler on a day filled with unforgiving rain and sleet. On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, spilling vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate. Despite the gloomy weather and concern about hazardous chemicals still lurking in the air and mud, Trump showed up at East Palestine when President Joe Biden didn’t.

Few noticed. I call it his inflection point. I am not sure that even he knew it at the time, but I sure did as I watched hundreds of folks line up along Main Street as his motorcade, filled with state and local law enforcement officers, siren-ed its way into town.

With him was the young U.S. senator JD Vance, who had been sworn into office less than a month earlier.

Young and old, male and female, Democrats and Republicans, and even the traditionally crowd-shy Amish families all stood in the icy rain as Trump drove into town only a couple of weeks after that 38-car train dumped poisonous residue into the water, soil, and air. It was a chain of events that began with a fiery derailment, the immediate effects of which continued for two days, followed by a controlled burn that released hydrogen chloride and phosgene into the air and water.

Within a month, the shift toward Trump in the polls had begun, but on that day, I wrote in my rain-smudged reporter’s notebook: “If he is able to resurrect the magic of 2016, understanding the forgotten man and woman and the dignity of work, it started here, the day he showed up when Biden refused.”

Trump understood that everyone’s lives there had changed on February 3; he understood the significance of weeks of silence from the White House regarding people’s concerns. Newsweek reported searching through 380 messages released from the White House press pool from the date of the crash to the day Trump arrived in East Palestine and found no direct statements from Biden on the community. Someone had to tell these people that he “saw” them and understood their fear and anger and pain.

Of note, Biden tweeted about East Palestine the day before, when Trump announced he would be coming to the Columbiana County village. Four days after Trump’s visit, when pressed, Biden said he had no plans to show up.

“You are not forgotten,” Trump said at a news conference, flanked by cases of “Trump” bottled water that he had brought for residents of the community. With him were Ohio’s Senator Vance, East Palestine’s Mayor Trent Conaway, and other local elected officials.

He looked at the audience and said, “In too many cases, your goodness and perseverance were met with indifference and betrayal.” Trump then walked through the village, wearing a long overcoat, his trousers tucked into Carhartt boots, and talked with people about how the train derailment had changed their lives and likely those of generations to come.

One resident, Tami Tsai, told me nearly a year later, when I noted what I had observed in February of 2023 when Trump showed up, “In a lot of ways, we are the symbol or poster child of the kind of place Washington forgets. President Biden underscored that by not coming then or now or ever.” (Biden did not go to East Palestine until February 16, 2024.)

Tsai added that unless someone “experienced what we did, unless you understood what it is like to be discarded as not important enough, Trump showing up for us showed he cared. There will always be people who said it was a stunt. Well, he didn’t have to do it, but he did. That is more than I can say for President Biden.”

Trump’s visit reminded people that he was physically there for them at a time when they were hurt and worried. He told them, “I am ready to fight for you.”

It’s a phrase he would use 17 months later when he returned to Butler for his first rally since the one held in October of 2020. He and his campaign chose a location that’s a tiny dot on a folded paper map with a stretch of blue lines, a place where presidents from either side of the aisle rarely visit.

When Trump rolled up on July 13, 2024, it was just two weeks after his debate with President Biden, a performance by the sitting president that shocked many Americans, including those in the press, because it revealed that the 81-year-old was struggling cognitively. His party began working furiously to unite to push him out of the White House race.

Butler, a county unfamiliar to many, one that few visited if they didn’t live there, was about to change everything in a way that no one saw coming.