Growing up in Butler, Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 1980s, I surely at some point must have encountered a book titled Butler, but it would have been at the town library at N. McKean Street or maybe the college library at what we call “BC3” — Butler County Community College. It would have been a history book, the sort of standard fare about any small town. Well, now, in July 2025, comes a book called Butler and it’s certainly about history. It’s about the shocking history that unraveled a year ago in my hometown, where Donald Trump was nearly assassinated.
The piece I immediately filed on that incident for The American Spectator was one of the first columns by anyone on the event. (READ Paul Kengor, “In My Hometown — Trump the Fighter.”) I was locked in that afternoon not only because it was my hometown and I had been planning to write about the Trump rally for our magazine, but because my 16-year-old son was there. My jaw dropped to the floor and my wife dropped to her knees in prayer as we watched the shooting live on Newsmax, the only network that had a full, nonstop coverage.
Of course, we knew right away that Trump was not killed. I still marvel at turning to my wife amid the trauma and saying, “Wow, Trump just shook his fist in the air and said, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’” We weren’t really worried about the former president. Our concern was for our son, his friends, and the tens of thousands of others. Those bullets fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks had to hit flesh somewhere. A fatal victim was a firefighter from Buffalo Township, Corey Comperatore. My son was fine. But Corey — someone else’s son, husband, father — was not.
I figured that my longtime friend Salena Zito — also a longtime friend of The American Spectator — was there. A fellow Pittsburgh-born, lifelong native of western Pennsylvania, who I first met when we both wrote for the late Dick Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Salena has distinguished herself as one of America’s best on-the-ground reporters with her “The Middle of Somewhere” dispatches. And no journalist knows or has covered Donald Trump like Zito. She was the one who in a September 2016 interview with Trump for the Atlantic coined the brilliant formulation: “Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally, whereas his critics take him literally but not seriously.” She predicted a Trump victory that November, claiming he would win our home state of Pennsylvania.
Zito certainly would not have missed Trump’s Butler appearance on July 13, 2024. She attended with the intention of doing a scheduled interview after his speech. She experienced much more than an interview. She saw everything, heard everything, and then repeatedly heard from Donald Trump over the next 24 hours in an intimate way no one else did. What she experienced was so remarkable that she has written a book titled, Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland.
The book is riveting. This review cannot do it justice. I’ll underscore some highlights, but I strongly advise getting the book for yourself and for friends.
“They Shoot Presidents in Butler”
The book begins with a fascinating historical parallel that Americans do not know about Butler, Pennsylvania. The opening chapter is titled, “They Shoot Presidents in Butler.” And here, Zito is talking about the nation’s first president, George Washington.
Growing up in western Pennsylvania, I knew well that Washington nearly died here multiple times. In fact, I’m one of the historians talking about that in the new Michael Medved film, The American Miracle. When I drive to my parents’ house we go right along the Washington Trail that the man blazed during those wild days when he nearly lost his life. One of those moments occurred when a bullet whizzed by Washington’s ear in Butler County.
Yes, seriously.
Salena Zito takes readers back to December 26, 1753, the day after Christmas. George Washington and his guide Christopher Gist were traversing the freezing wilderness of what is now present-day Butler County en route to the forks of the Ohio River. Zito notes that Washington would write in his journal “that fear coursed through his veins and spurred the urgency of their flight after he was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet that whizzed past his ear just hours earlier.” Zito writes:
He wasn’t wrong. As soon as the group came to a clearing, one of the Indians sprinted ahead of them into a meadow and then turned to face the two men before firing point-blank at Washington from fifteen paces. [Had he succeeded] everything in the world would have changed at that moment…. There would have been no General Washington, no President Washington, and we might not have the country we call America today if that bullet had been only an inch closer.
The parallel to Donald Trump in Butler 271 years later is chilling.
An Inch Away — Again
Washington’s shooter had just missed. He was a mere inch away from slaying the future president. Just as Trump’s shooter in Butler was just an inch away.
Salena Zito was there and felt it. Her next chapter is titled just that, “One Inch Away.” She writes:
BUTLER, Pennsylvania. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
I felt the velocity in the same split second that I heard the four gunshots. My eyes were fixated on former president Donald Trump, who stood a mere few feet away from me on an outdoor stage in front of the podium.
It was July 13, 2024.
Zito was there with her daughter and son-in-law, parents of her beloved grandchildren. She and her daughter are gun owners and knew what the sound meant. She was knocked to the ground by lead Trump press advance man, Michel Picard III. But all along, her gaze never left her presidential subject:
Everything happened simultaneously, seemed to happen in split-second layers. I saw him flinch. He grabbed his ear. I saw the blood streak on his face as the bullets cut across the stage, and he ducked down below the podium.
“Get down, get down, get down!” a male voice shouted from behind me, directed at the president.
My initial thought was that the podium would not protect him—please, someone get there to protect him….
I was frozen, still staring at the president seconds later, when we heard a second round of four shots.
A swarm of Secret Service agents dressed in navy blue formed a protective shield around Trump. From inside their huddle, Zito could hear a female agent say, “What are we doing? What are we doing?” Then, “Where are we going?”
Just then, four more shots went off. “Time seemed to stop,” said Zito. “Everything that was happening around me occurred in slow motion.” Though the confused crowd was eerily quiet, Zito could hear one woman’s “primal” screams: “I don’t know if she was hurt, if someone she loved was hurt…. It seemed like she was moving around in the stands behind me. Her screams were gut wrenching. One or two of the last four shots sounded like they came from a different-caliber gun.”
Presumably, that other gun was directed at Crooks.
“The hand of God”
Salena Zito’s narrative continues along these lines, and it is gripping.
Jumping ahead, I must call attention to one of the most meaningful takeaways from the incident, which I’ve written about at The American Spectator. (READ: Paul Kengor, “God and Donald Trump.”) Trump felt that God Himself intervened to spare his life that day. The number of times he has said that publicly is remarkable. I’ve documented many instances. But especially interesting from Salena Zito’s book is that she documents the number of times that Trump contacted her and told her the same after the shooting. It started with a voicemail when she awoke the next morning: “Good morning, Salena! It’s Donald Trump. I wanted to see if you and your daughter Shannon and Michael are okay. And I wanted to apologize that we weren’t able to do the interview.”
Zito was stunned. She could not help but answer the president of the United States in crass language: “All due respect, Mr. President, but are you f–king kidding me? You’ve just been shot; I was only near you!”
Trump laughed and repeated his concern — for her and her daughter and son-in-law: “Seriously, Salena, are you and your family okay?”
Their conversation lasted twelve minutes, with Trump marveling that there had been no panicked stampede by the crowd, that he was deeply saddened by the death of Corey Comperatore, that he was impressed with the treatment he received at Butler Memorial Hospital, and how the large display chart that he pointed to at the rally turned his head just perfectly. He said that when the agents first got to him “they actually thought I was gone.”
Trump also said he was stunned by the people on the other side of the aisle who reached out to make sure he was okay. “I’m getting calls from Democrats that are unbelievable,” he said, “from different people you would never think would call me.” His voice then trailed off as he shared, “This could be an opportunity to bring the country together.”
Amazingly, Trump called Salena Zito seven more times that Sunday. Yes, seven. Each call lasted around ten minutes. They talked about God and divine intervention and Trump’s sense of a larger purpose. His last call came that evening. In their final conversation that day, Zito asked if Trump was okay with her sharing precisely how he felt, including about divine intervention: “I asked him again — this time more pointedly — whether he thought that a higher power had a hand…. Trump paused. ‘God,’ he said. ‘The hand of God.’”
Trump told Zito that he had felt that God had been with him in times past during his path back to the presidency, but none of those occasions “compares to what happened yesterday, I cannot dismiss that God has been with me. This time, though, it was a big one.”
So much so that Trump told Zito that he had thrown out his previously prepared speech for the coming Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in just four days: “Honestly, Salena, it is going to be a whole different speech now…. It went from the world’s most vicious speech to ‘Let’s bring the country together.’ May not be as exciting, but there it is.”
And such it was. What a shift. A brush with death can do that. It changes a person. Even Donald Trump.
Must-Read Book and Must-See Movie
In her fascinating insider’s account, Salena Zito talks about still much more: the Milwaukee convention, Thomas Matthew Crooks and his family, Corey Comperatore and his family, and, yes, the epic failure of the Secret Service to protect Donald Trump.
Her closing chapter talks about the special congressional task force on Butler set up to investigate that failure, chaired by my Republican congressman and fellow Butler High School alum Rep. Mike Kelly. (Read: Mike Kelly, “Trump Addresses the Northern Border.”) Kelly promised this to Zito: “There will be a reckoning for our institutions and that includes our press.”
That word “reckoning” is the book’s final word.
All of this and more is in Zito’s remarkable work. It sounds like it would make a great movie, right? Well, I must end with an exciting element about her story. The film rights have been sold to the talented Pense Productions, the Pittsburgh- and LA-based company run by Scott Sander and his two sons Christian and Colin.
That is great news, because this must-read book on the untold story of Donald Trump in Butler would be a must-see movie.