Salena Zito’s new book is less the story of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, than it is the lengthier story of the 2024 campaign for the presidency. As such, it is also the story of the fight for a piece of America’s heartland, and for a key element of Mr. Trump’s coalition that few observers have identified.
Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland, by Saleno Zito (242 pages, Center Street, 2025)
This isn’t simply the “untold story” of a certain key event that took place in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. But it surely is the now-told story of a certain journalist who covered that event—and covered it up close and somewhat personal at that. As such, it is much more an autobiographical, rather than a strictly historical, account of the near assassination of Donald Trump.
In fact, it is less the story, untold or otherwise, of the assassination attempt itself than it is the lengthier story of the 2024 campaign for the presidency. As such, it is also the story of the fight for a piece of America’s heartland. And that specific piece would be western Pennsylvania.
It’s also worth noting that this book opens with the near-death experience of another American president that occurred much earlier in our history. Why? Because that event also occurred in western Pennsylvania. In fact, it may well have taken place somewhere fairly close to the general vicinity of the same neck of the woods surrounding Butler. Not only that, but the bullet meant for that individual apparently came close to clipping—guess what?—his right ear. In sum, both the geographical location and the targeted area of the body happened to be pretty much the same for both men.
Donald Trump tells Salena Zito that the “hand of God” may well have been in action on July 13, 2024. Might it also have been at work somewhat earlier and somewhere close by?
There, if the opening two paragraphs amount to a letdown of sorts, then the third and fourth paragraphs should qualify as a teaser of sorts. But if that teaser should lead you to satisfy your curiosity about an event of more than minor importance that occurred in our distant past, make sure that you do more than dip into Butler—and/or Butler. Why? Because you might learn a few things about our much more recent past, courtesy of an American journalist who has had the good sense to stay away from the bubble that is Washington, DC.
Salena Zito, like Donald Trump, is not a creature of our nation’s capital. This is not to say that Zito is unknown to Trump. In fact, she has interviewed him more than a few times. That much becomes apparent almost immediately in this book. By her own inexact count, she has interviewed Trump “several times.” By her own precise estimate, the “most famous” such exchange took place in 2016 when she said to him: “Voters take you seriously but not literally, whereas my profession takes you literally, but does not take your candidacy seriously.”
That interview took place shortly after Zito accepted a buyout from her longtime employer, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Yes, Butler is in Salena Zito’s near-backyard. Yes, the residents of Butler and its environs are her people. And yes, she is very much in sync with those people, especially those people who were on hand for the Trump rally on July 13, 2024.
Even more to the point, she rightly, and frequently, reminds the reader that those in her “profession” who cover politics are not in sync with, nor remotely curious about, either her people or their lives. Instead, they are all too much in agreement with those political figures who are inclined to dismiss her people as “crazies” (John McCain) or “deplorables (Hillary Clinton). Therefore, her people, perhaps not so surprisingly, also happen to be Trump’s people.
Trump may dismiss and demean his rivals, but he does not dismiss or demean the average American, whether that be the average American worker or the average American farmer or the average American church goer or the average American small business owner or the average American family member. In other words, he doesn’t dismiss or demean those who once comprised the heart and soul of the Democratic party.
As an unnamed Trump voter once put it, “he says what I’m thinking.” He also says much that Salena Zito has been thinking and vice versa.
As Zito sees it, there is one more significant element to the new coalition that is crucial to the success of the new Republican party. It’s not the ordinary American versus the elite. It’s not those in flyover country versus those on either coast. It’s not the city versus the countryside. It’s not the new Republican south versus the old Republican north. It’s not men versus women. So what, or who, is it? Put simply, but starkly, it’s often those who choose to live their lives close to where they were born and raised versus those who choose to live somewhere, even anywhere, else.
To be sure, both political parties have changed rather significantly in recent decades. But the changes within the Democratic party have been much greater and much more dramatic. This is both Salena Zito’s conclusion and the correct conclusion. The Republican party has long been the conservative party. Now, to borrow from Zito, it is the party of conservative populism. The Democratic party has long been the liberal party. Now, to be more blunt that Zito is willing to be, it is a leftist party.
To continue that bluntness—and to sustain Zito’s line of thought: The Democratic party was once the party of the American working class; today the Republican party is the party of the American working class.
Should the second half of that last sentence have ended with a comma followed by “thanks to one Donald J. Trump?” One Salena Zito would likely object to the addition of such a phrase, but not because she dislikes or objects to Donald Trump. Not at all. Instead, it is her correct contention that Trump did not so much create or in any way call into being the new Republican party. He simply took full advantage of the political situation–and the political opportunity–that should have been staring every Democrat right in the face.
For that matter, it ought to have been staring a lot of Republicans in the face as well. The political rise of Donald Trump is itself an amazing story, but what is doubly amazing is that it took a Donald Trump, a political novice, to see what should have been front and center for every experienced professional pol in the business.
Politicians like to think of themselves as public servants. And they especially like to call themselves public servants. But politicians, especially career politicians, often do not behave like public servants. Donald Trump may not be the current incarnation of Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith, who went to Washington, but he is acting like a public servant. Actually, he is a public servant, and he knows it.
Salena Zito knows it as well. In fact, she chronicled the initial rise of conservative populism and the subsequent rise of Donald Trump in her 2018 book, co-authored by Brad Todd, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. In sum, Donald Trump was less the creator of this movement than he was the “result” of it.
The heart of that movement is composed of those she terms the “placed,” otherwise defined as those who have remained on hand to live their lives where they were born and raised. Then there are the “placeless” who have left various places, maybe even escaped this or that place, in order to follow a career path. Gone is a commitment to a neighborhood or a community. In its place is a commitment to “ideologies and abstractions.”
That distinction may be a bit harsh, but there is a ring of truth to it nonetheless, especially as it applies to many of Zito’s brother and sister journalists, who once were quick to abandon their home territory and then became all too quick to label those they left behind as racists or homophobes or worse.
Zito also thinks that the “placeless” press has mistakenly presumed that the “placed” are filled with resentment toward our institutions, including the press itself. Moreover the placeless presume that the placed are animated and driven by their grievances. Zito begs to differ and to differ very seriously: “It isn’t resentment and it is not anger; it really isn’t.”
What then is the message? Does it mean the need to build counter institutions? Does it mean abandoning the public school system and turning to homeschooling? Zito doesn’t speculate. She only knows that a “reckoning” is coming. Here she is no doubt right, as she is also right to contend that resentment and anger are far from the driving forces that the placeless presume them to be, perhaps even wish them to be.
She also knows that the Democrats of today do not have the answers for tomorrow. Just as she knew that the Democrats were headed for defeat in 2024. Kamala Harris had never had to appeal to the blue-collar voter to win elective office in California; therefore her appeal in 2024 was bound to be forced and ineffectual. And it was.
Borrowing from another western Pennsylvanian, namely Gertrude Stein, Zito contends that there was never any “there there” when it came to the Harris campaign. Well, yes—and no. The actual “there” that was there was new-fashioned leftism, not old-fashioned liberalism. Therefore, it has to be suppressed and/or disguised. And it was.
Everything about the Harris-Walz campaign had to be very tightly scripted. And it was. The most telling and amusing portions of the book deal with the futility of their campaign in this piece of the American heartland, which would include a Trump return visit to Butler in the midst of the fall campaign and his opening words: “… as I was saying.”
Those occasional portions of the book that deal with the exchanges between Trump and Zito are also telling and amusing—and ultimately a bit foreboding, especially in the chapter titled “There Will Never Be Another One Like Him…”
In fact, there might have been neither Trump nor Vance after the events of July 13, 2024. The former president told Zito that he had met with Vance shortly before July 13 and had toyed with bringing him to Butler and announcing his choice for vice-president on that very occasion. But he then decided that he wasn’t quite ready to decide. So there would be no J. D. Vance presence on that makeshift stage.
But there was the presence of that now infamous chart, thank God. As if on cue, a very large chart on illegal immigration appeared on the screen. Trump then did two things that Zito had rarely seen him do: He went “full Ross Perot” by deploying a chart at a rally, and then he turned his face away from his listeners. Those two things, done at the same time, “actions that he had never done before… saved his life.”
The hand of God in action? It’s as good an explanation as any. Will it matter in the end or at least as time goes on. We’ll see. In the meantime, this book is very much worth reading, well beyond your discovering that the hand of God might have had a hand in our history well before Donald Trump rode down that escalator on that June day in 2015.
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The featured image, uploaded by Tim Kennedy, is “Donald Trump standing next to Corey Comperatore’s firefighter uniform while giving his acceptance speech at the final night of the Republican National Convention.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.