Salena Zito talks ‘Butler,’ Her Book On The Trump Rally Shooting

Salena Zito was standing just four feet from President Trump’s podium when she heard the pops.

All of a sudden, what was meant to be a campaign rally on July 13, 2024, in the Republican stronghold of Butler, Penn., became the scene of an attempted assassination. Zito, a writer for the Washington Examiner and native of the region, had just wrapped a pre-rally interview with then-candidate Trump. Her daughter — a photojournalist — was close by when the shots rang out. A nearby security officer tackled Zito, likely to protect her from being struck by a stray round.

Capturing a moment that changed everything in Butler, PA

“I was very aware that history was happening in front of me,” Zito told me, in an interview about her new book Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland, which hit shelves last week — and has just debuted at #1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.

“The angle I was looking at (President Trump), it was so crystal clear. I saw the streak of blood across his face. I saw him grab his ear. I saw him take himself down, and not fall down. I knew what the sound was immediately.”

Zito’s book is a raw and detailed account of that day. “Her analysis is sharp-eyed and her anecdotes revealing,” reads a review of Butler in The Guardian. And speaking of reviews, her subject couldn’t resist adding one of his own — Trump raved in a Truth Social post that Zito’s is a “powerful new book” and that she “was an eyewitness to that terrible day, and understands the unbreakable Spirit of our Movement to FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT.”

The book is also something deeper. Beyond the you-are-there narrative, Butler is a meditation on place – on the kind of regions, like Butler County, that Zito argues are too often overlooked by the media and political class. “I want readers to understand the importance of place,” she told me. “Not just in what happened in Butler. But in how the country voted. Place and rootedness has a lot to do with that.”

Zito writes with authority not just because she was there — but because she’s actually from there. Her family settled in Butler County in the 1750s. She knows the rhythms of the region and the values that drive the people who live there, and her reporting connects the dots between a town rocked by a would-be assassin and a country that re-elected Trump months later, in part because of places just like Butler.

The book also contains new insight from Zito’s interviews with the president in the aftermath. “What he says about why he said ‘fight, fight, fight’ — he told me that the next morning,” she said. “He understands now the presidency isn’t just about him. It’s about projecting strength. It’s about preserving the vision of what the presidency is supposed to be.”

She added that Trump, whom she’s interviewed many times over the years, seemed fundamentally changed. “He believes he was saved for a reason. There are a number of things he did that day that he never does. The way he is governing now is as a man who understands he was given a chance — and he wants to use that chance to accomplish something.”

Butler is as much about the gravity of that day as it is about how geography, identity, and community helped shape a moment in history and a candidate whose life almost ended before the election did. And with the book now sitting atop the New York Times bestseller list, it’s clear that message is resonating.

“Trump is one of only two presidents that have ever campaigned in Butler,” Zito reminds me. “The other is John F. Kennedy.”