Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland

A gripping first-hand account of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump written by the acclaimed journalist who was only a few feet away from the stage when the gunshots began.

There are moments that change history forever. Moments people talk about, commemorate, and pray over for years to come. The Reagan shooting, the Challenger explosion, 9/11, January 6th. Salena Zito had no idea on that Saturday morning in Butler, Pennsylvania that she would be present for one of them.

Had the wind gusted less, had the former president'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 Pennsylvania native who happened to be four feet from the presidential podium when the shots were fired, with access to Trump (including 7 separate conversations with him in the 24 hours after the shooting), Salena Zito has written the definitive book on this assault on American democracy. "I rarely look away from the crowd," Trump told her in one of those exclusive interviews. "Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?"

As a local reporter with deep ties to the area, Salena was granted access to community members, rally participants, family members and local law enforcement officials. For the reporting of this book, President Trump granted the author exclusive access, along with his top aides and even his security detail. Zito explores the unanswered questions surrounding this attack: Who was this shooter? What were his motives? Why was it so easy for him to get so shockingly close to murdering an American president? Why did law enforcement respond so lethargically when the shooter was pointed out beforehand by bystanders in the crowd? How will the Secret Service be held accountable for a situation not seen since the attack on Reagan in 1981? What dangers lie in wait for Trump in the months and years ahead?

There are moments that define America. The late afternoon hours of July 13, 2024 as the sun plunged westward over a field in Pennsylvania was one of them. This book is a narrative of that fateful day, the people involved, the untold story of how the president found his way back into the heart of the electorate, why he goes to places like Butler in the first place and the coming reckoning in our institutions as a result of what happened that day.

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.