Book review: Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland, by Salena Zito

If I could put five stars in the subtitle, I would.

“Salena, it’s so great to see you. How are you doing? How are all those grandkids?”

Just minutes before history would be altered, Donald Trump was backstage greeting one of his favorite reporters and her photographer daughter in Butler, Pennsylvania, not far from where the reporter in question, Salena Zito, grew up. Zito was invited there to interview the once and future President as part of her journaling job when she ended up tackled on the ground as shots rang out, just feet from history.

Surely there were dozens of reporters at the Butler rally who could have given their own version of events. But Zito is different - not only was she covering an event on her home turf, but she was also the one who cared about the perspective of people who attended the event and in her native state of Pennsylvania at large. There’s a passage in Butler, where she’s on her way to covering a J.D. Vance event in Erie, that illustrates in part what I’m talking about:

Vance was heading to an off-the-record site, Gordon’s Butcher Shop, with the national press. I got to tag along in the press van. I saw several reporters I know, including one from the New York Times. We chatted about pleasantries and then he settled in, looking at his phone. They were all looking at their phones. No one was looking up. I mentioned out loud, to no one in particular, the importance of this county and pointed out some neighborhoods that could turn this election. No one looked up as I pointed toward where you could see a little bit of the General Electric plant that had once employed about eighteen thousand people; just about everyone who lived here had an uncle, father, grandfather, sister, or mother who worked there.

(…)

After a while, I gave up trying to tell the reporters about this place. They didn’t seem to notice that along the three-mile stretch the motorcade took to Gordon’s, the streets in the neighborhoods and along US 19 were lined with Trump-Vance supporters.

(…)

I did not see a single reporter look up from their phone.

That is the “fight for America’s heartland” implied in the book’s title. Indeed, Butler was a galvanizing event and the cynics among us could argue that Trump was destined to win the election once his would-be assassin tried to kill the king and missed. But what I’ve always liked about Zito is the same factor that gave television personality Mike Rowe a career: not only does she not ignore the common man, Salena celebrates him and listens to what he has to say.

Nor does she exist in an information silo, as she speaks to Democrats and Republicans alike in this volume. This came in handy when Salena tried to cover the Kamala Harris campaign in Pennsylvania, finding their campaign was afraid of speaking to regular people. For example, they cleared out the local Pittsburgh restaurant landmark Primanti’s of Sunday afternoon customers watching a Steelers game only to bring in about 30 hand-picked Harris supporters for a photo-op. Out of dozens of locally-owned businesses they could have selected to do a “man on the street” type of appearance in Pittsburgh’s gentrified Strip District, they picked a chain location of Penzeys Spices. (He and I have a small bit of history, so I chuckled about that one.) Salena cited these as lost opportunities to interact with regular voters and eventually bet her boss a shot of tequila Trump would carry Pennsylvania as well as the other swing states. (No word as of publication time whether she got her tequila for winning the wager.)

Yet the narrative doesn’t begin with the events at the venue where Trump was knocked down and triumphantly returned a few weeks later. Zito looks at the shift that’s occurred in the region over the last decade, as an area where people with roots and family in place have made their home for generations, adapting as steel and manufacturing industries moved out, replaced by a booming energy sector that was being threatened to Beltway bureaucrats and their regulations. In fact, Zito believed the GOP tide began to turn from the upstart Ron DeSantis campaign to backing Trump once again in the 2024 campaign when the former President paid a visit to East Palestine, Ohio - a town struck by an environmental tragedy yet forgotten by Joe Biden until late in the campaign. This was surprising to her because Biden had previously been popular in union-heavy Pennsylvania, especially the Scranton area where he grew up. But they began turning their backs on President Autopen when he ignored East Palestine until he couldn’t anymore, then gave it comparative lip service.

She even opens her book by noting Trump wasn’t the first President to be wounded in Butler - as the French and Indian War opened in the 18th century, a young George Washington survived being ambushed by an Indian allied with nearby French forces.

To me, though, what gives this book the most meaning is the combination of passion and “shoe leather” reporting enclosed within. I’ve written a pair of books, so I have a little bit of understanding about the work that’s required to put one together. But what I don’t have - and I think that missing ingredient would have made mine far better - is that reporter’s intuition and experience Zito has, particularly when writing about a series of events that’s still fresh in our minds: it’s worth remembering that the assassination attempt was just a year ago last Sunday. (I got the book on Tuesday and wrote the review this past Saturday, exactly 52 weeks after the events in Butler occurred.)

Being a fan of Zito for several years, I jumped at the chance to preorder the book when it became available in late February. I figured the book was going to be what it was - a great perspective on an important political race in a key battleground state, one which also looked at a seminal event in our history. In that respect, I wasn’t disappointed.

But what made it even better was the fact that it humanized all the characters in the story, including the author herself. I’ve always had a sense of empathy with her because she hails from a region not unlike the one where I grew up and not totally foreign to where I live now. (The places I’ve been just aren’t as hilly.) But the woman whose columns I’ve enjoyed for several years became a lot more real with this story, and perhaps that’s the best lesson a would-be journalist can glean from this book.

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.