It's almost a year ago now, the Butler, Pennsylvania moment that changed history. You probably remember where you were when you heard the news—that then former president and candidate for president Donald Trump had been shot at a campaign rally.
The nation had suffered trauma before; the killings of Abraham Lincoln and JFK wracked the country, and the near miss against Ronald Reagan reminded us of how tenuous our democracy can be.
But it was Trump’s reaction that arguably changed the course of our history in modern days. He stood up, seconds after taking a bullet to the ear—millimeters from his brain—and shouted, “FIGHT!”
If anyone doubted the man’s spirit before that, they were fully awakened in that moment.
From that moment on, it seemed assured that he would become president again, and indeed he did.
Related: WON'T BACK DOWN: Injured Trump Pumps Fist As Blood Streams Down Face
Now a new book is coming out detailing some of the behind-the-scenes actions and what it was like in real-time. Trump was immediately aware of the significance of the moment:
The book, titled, "2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America," was written by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf and is set to be released on July 8.
Susie Wiles, now Trump's chief of staff, told those around her to get down as gunshots rang out at the rally on July 13, 2024.
The shooting stopped. Wiles rushed to the side of the tent to see if she could tell what had happened. She caught a glimpse of Trump just as he was standing up. She saw the blood. She saw him struggling with the agents, looking for his shoes, raising his fist. She couldn’t tell where he was hit, but she thought he was going to be okay," the excerpt, published by the Washington Post, read.
Just as Trump jumped up after the shooting and refused to duck for safety, he had no interest in a stretcher:
"Wiles didn’t see adviser Dan Scavino in the car now either. She looked back and saw him some forty feet behind, picking something up off the ground. She rolled down her window and shouted, ‘Get in the car!’ Only when he got inside and the motorcade started rolling did Wiles notice what Scavino had stopped to retrieve: the red MAGA cap that Trump had been wearing, stained with his blood," the authors wrote.
As the motorcade left the rally, Wiles spoke to the head of Trump's Secret Service team, who told her that the president was breathing and was okay. Trump walked into the hospital, refusing to use a stretcher because he didn't want the "visual," the excerpt said.
And like Reagan did so many years before—joking that he hoped his surgeons were Republicans—Trump quickly turned to humor:
"It was bleeding like a b----," Trump told the authors in an interview. "They thought I had four or five bullets in me because there was so much blood."
The authors wrote that his aides realized the president was okay when he started cracking jokes.
I look forward to reading this book when it comes out on July 8 and finding out more about the moment that arguably will go down as one of the seminal events in American history. It's still hard to fathom how close we came to an entirely different outcome:
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