Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland
About this audiobook
From the acclaimed journalist standing only a few feet away from the stage when the gunshots began is this gripping first-hand account of the near assassination of Donald Trump – and the inside story of Trump’s heartland-fueled victory.
That day in Butler, had the wind gusted less, had Trump’s head turned in a slightly different direction, or had the adrenaline-fueled heart of the shooter beat slower, America would have been plunged into chaos, possibly even civil war. As a local reporter with deep ties to the area, Salena Zito had been invited by the president to interview him at the Butler Farm Show Grounds. She was standing only four feet away from the presidential podium when the bullets flew. A campaign staffer tackled her to the ground.
Throughout it all, Salena never stopped reporting. She spoke by phone to Trump several times in the immediate aftermath and was granted access to community members, rally participants, family members and local law enforcement officials. “I rarely look away from the crowd,” Trump told her in one of several of those conversations. “Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?”
Known for her on-the-ground reporting on populism and rural America, Salena zooms out to tell the fascinating story of the battle for America’s heartland and the issues that actually motivate voters. To understand how and why Trump won the 2024 election, you have to understand places like Butler. Big cities like Los Angeles, New York and D.C. don’t decide who wins election cycles, but people in places like Butler, Pennsylvania sure do. President Trump gave the author extraordinary access for this book, including to his top aides, to his running mate JD Vance, to billionaire supporter Elon Musk, and even his security detail.
There are moments that define America. The late afternoon hours of July 13, 2024 was one of them. This book is a narrative of that fateful day, the people of the heartland and the untold story of how the president found his way back into the heart of the electorate.
About the author
Salena Zito is a veteran political reporter with more than 20 years of award-winning experience in print and broadcast journalism. With her trusty Jeep that shows 400,000 miles on the odometer and a refusal to travel on interstates, Zito is a reporter that harkens to an older generation of journalism, one that listens to the stories of everyday Americans in places far outside the artificial bubbles of Manhattan and the Beltway. This willingness to travel and listen made Zito one of the only journalists to understand the outcome of the 2016 election long before her peers. One of the last scribes of middle America, she famously identified the root cause of their failed coverage and underestimation of Donald Trump by concluding, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Zito is currently a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner, a post she has held since 2016, and is a regular contributor for the Wall Street Journal. She was previously a columnist at the New York Post and The Atlantic. Throughout her career she was a reporter and columnist for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review where her columns were must reads for those seeking to understand the Pennsylvania political landscape. Her columns have been syndicated in more than 200 local, regional, and national newspapers nationwide. Zito was a CNN contributor for five years and remains a frequent broadcast guest for her insights on the American electorate.
