Growing up in Butler, Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 1980s, I surely at some point must have encountered a book titled Butler, but it would have been at the town library at N. McKean Street or maybe the college library at what we call “BC3” — Butler County Community College. It would have been a history book, the sort of standard fare about any small town. Well, now, in July 2025, comes a book called Butler and it’s certainly about history. It’s about the shocking history that unraveled a year ago in my hometown, where Donald Trump was nearly assassinated.
The piece I immediately filed on that incident for The American Spectator was one of the first columns by anyone on the event. (READ Paul Kengor, “In My Hometown — Trump the Fighter.”) I was locked in that afternoon not only because it was my hometown and I had been planning to write about the Trump rally for our magazine, but because my 16-year-old son was there. My jaw dropped to the floor and my wife dropped to her knees in prayer as we watched the shooting live on Newsmax, the only network that had a full, nonstop coverage.
Of course, we knew right away that Trump was not killed. I still marvel at turning to my wife amid the trauma and saying, “Wow, Trump just shook his fist in the air and said, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’” We weren’t really worried about the former president. Our concern was for our son, his friends, and the tens of thousands of others. Those bullets fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks had to hit flesh somewhere. A fatal victim was a firefighter from Buffalo Township, Corey Comperatore. My son was fine. But Corey — someone else’s son, husband, father — was not.
I figured that my longtime friend Salena Zito — also a longtime friend of The American Spectator — was there. A fellow Pittsburgh-born, lifelong native of western Pennsylvania, who I first met when we both wrote for the late Dick Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Salena has distinguished herself as one of America’s best on-the-ground reporters with her “The Middle of Somewhere” dispatches. And no journalist knows or has covered Donald Trump like Zito. She was the one who in a September 2016 interview with Trump for the Atlantic coined the brilliant formulation: “Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally, whereas his critics take him literally but not seriously.” She predicted a Trump victory that November, claiming he would win our home state of Pennsylvania.
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