Fulcrum at Butler
Salena Zito's behind-the-scenes book is the definitive chronicle of the tipping point of both 2024's election and Donald Trump's political career
The boots told me I needed to worry. Star-spangled, red-white-and-blue cowboy boots. They were on the legs of a lady knocked to the ground in a still photograph splattered all over cable news the evening Donald Trump got shot.
I knew those boots. They belonged to my co-author and friend, Salena Zito, the journalist who has become the poet laureate of the Appalachian working class. Just a few feet from Trump when he was inches from being assassinated, she has put her story in a book called BUTLER: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland. In bookstores this week, this book will be the definitive chronicling of that pivotal event, the fulcrum of the 2024 election and Donald Trump’s political career.
When I learned of the shooting that evening of July 13, I confess my first thought was not about Trump’s prognosis. It also was not about the prospect of an upended Republican ticket, or the chance of a civil war. Those were my second, third and fourth thoughts. My first thought was about the safety of Salena, and my client, now-Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA), who was speaking ahead of Trump at the rally.
Butler, Pennsylvania, is in Salena’s backyard. Nothing could keep her from a 50,000-person rally at the Farm Show grounds. That meant there were at least 10,000 good storylines – most of them of a kind only she could find.
Salena is unique in her profession. She grinds – but others also grind. She is a wordsmith – but there are plenty. Her secret is genuine interest in the American commoner. They recognize her sincerity and are unguarded with her.
Most journalists cover political rallies from the press bullpen. They scribble down key remarks, observe rally-goers from a distance and make notes to sprinkle color into the speech. They text with operatives for fresh quotable insights. Then they get on the press bus to the plane and file stories. It’s an efficient, easy means of analyzing politics, much like we analyze elephants at the zoo.
Salena almost never does that. She watches rallies amidst the crowd. She lingers in the parking lot with those who arrive early to tailgate. She talks to security guards. She looks for people who don’t seem like the rally-going type. I can vouch for her ability to get almost anyone to talk, about almost anything. She went to beauty school in a previous career and nobody can open up a stranger like a hairdresser.
But on July 13, she was not in the crowd. She had scheduled an interview with Trump before the rally, a process that put her close to the stage – and when I saw those boots on the ground, I got worried.
I shot her a text: “please confirm you are ok.” It went unanswered for a bit. I paced. Finally, her reply came. “I’m ok…numb.” And as is typical for someone with her work ethic, she texted “on CNN in five minutes. Just really don’t feel anything. Which I know isn’t good.”
“Bad sign,” I said. “I mean I was right beside him,” she wrote back.
That’s not the only time Salena was right beside Trump, as the readers of BUTLER will learn. She was also there in February, 2023, just forty-two miles from Butler in the village of East Palestine, where a train derailment had spilled toxic chemicals. To cover the trip, the New York Times sneered: “his ability to be empathetic has never been a strong suit.”
Salena saw something different.
“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…even the traditionally crowd-shy Amish families all stood in the icy rain as Trump drove into town…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””
Back in 2016, Salena was literally the only reporter in America who predicted Trump would win the first time. She told me after a reporting trip along the historic Lincoln Highway. Then she said it in print – a gutsy call in a herded profession. Her explanation in the New York Post is common knowledge now, but was avant garde insight in 2016: Trump had latent strength with low-propensity voters under-represented in polls.
“In interview after interview in all corners of the state, I’ve found that Trump’s support across the ideological spectrum remains strong. Democrats, Republicans, independents, people who have not voted in presidential elections for years — they have not wavered in their support…They are middle-class and they do not live in a big city. They are suburban to rural and are not poor — an element I found fascinating.”
Salena’s book takes the reader behind the scenes, not just on July 13, but when Trump returned to Butler later in the fall of 2024, and to her backstage interactions with him before and since. You hear why Trump is valued by the novel coalition he has built, in voices only Salena’s old-school journalism can identify. Her on-the-ground reporting contrasts the overly-scripted Harris campaign, averse to authentic retail politicking, with the extemporaneous barn-storming Trump tour. You’ll understand how and why Trump won Pennsylvania, and with it, the election.
Supporters of President Trump will enjoy the peek behind the curtain of 2024’s defining moments. His critics, most of whom keep underestimating his appeal, should hear out the voices Salena Zito uniquely brings to the fore.
NOTE TO READERS: The author and Salena Zito co-wrote The Great Revolt: Inside The Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, in 2018.