But for a bullet just barely missing a future president near Butler, Pennsylvania, American – world – history would have changed forever. That happened on July 13, 2024, when Donald Trump moved his head ever so slightly, turning a fatal headshot into a graze, but it also happened there on Dec. 26, 1753, when an assassin took a shot at 21-year-old George Washington and missed. That’s just one of the many revelations in Salena Zito’s terrific new bestseller “Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland.” But the most important of the many revelations revealed by one of the very few reporters not blinded by their own pro-regime prejudices is that Donald Trump believes he was saved by Providence to Make America Great Again.
He clearly was.
Our Official Betters will snicker at the very thought of divine intervention, citing this belief by the president and millions of his supporters as further evidence of their embarrassing parochialism, but they weren’t there. Salena Zito was (Full Disclosure: Salena has been a good friend for years, bonding with me over shared Pennsylvania roots). She was within a few feet of Trump that day, covering the rally as a journalist up close and personally instead of in the back with the cool kids clique of DC and NY hacks snickering at the rubes as they sweltered in the summer sun out in that foreign country called “America.”
She heard the crack of the bullets; she saw the blood splatter across his face. No one else could have written this book.
Moreover, no one else would have – it takes too seriously the people the regime media ignores except for their occasional visits to the heartland where they visit a diner and amuse themselves by observing the antics of the John Deere-hatted locals like Margaret Mead studying the Samoans.
Salena was the first journalist to understand and report that something big was brewing outside the Beltway back in 2016. She drove through America, and not on the interstates, actually reporting. What she found was a movement of people left behind, disrespected, and forgotten that had found the unlikeliest of leaders in a brash Queens billionaire who never went anywhere without his trademark suit and who had never touched a drop of alcohol. She saw the story that everyone else in the media missed, but then everyone else in the media also missed the story of how Joe Biden was perceived as a senile human eggplant. That screw-up was probably intentional, but it highlights how the coiffed and curated correspondents of the networks and the few remaining big papers are just plain bad at their jobs. You read their stuff and grow actively dumber. Take the Maryland Man saga; they portrayed that creep as a loving father, cruelly ambushed on the way home from his daily session of reading bedtime stories to orphans. It took alternative journalists to point out that he is a gangbanging, wife-beating, human-trafficking monster – and maybe worse. They either lied to you on purpose, which is bad, or they were incompetent at what is nominally their job, which is horrible in its own way. Ditto the regime media and senile Biden. But enough about Jake Tapper.
Sadly, Salena Zito is the exception, not the rule. Think of America with a media that cared enough about regular Americans to listen to them, and to not lie to us. Instead of real journalists, our regime media is an embarrassing collection of clowns, hacks, and talking potatoes. But enough about Brian Stelter.
Butler does not just tell the history of this presidential bullet-dodging city and the play-by-play about what actually happened on that terrible day last July when America avoided a catastrophe, though one citizen was murdered and others were hurt. Salena illustrates the huge impact the murder of Corey Comperatore had on the President, how the shooting made him reevaluate his own life, and how it recommitted him to the movement. The intensity and seriousness he has shown during his incredible first six months as president are a direct result of what happened in Butler.
We also see how the Trump election campaign was built and executed, with insights into how it handled the swap-out of Grampa Badfinger for Kamala Harris. You will read reporting on Kamala’s ineptitude that you will find nowhere else – it’s staggering how bad she and her crew of over-credentialed cretins were.
But the real story is the one we did not have to experience. If not for that slight movement of his head – a gesture he had never before made at a rally – Trump would have died. Think about that. A hated, loathed, outsider presidential candidate was murdered to the delight of the ruling class, as if America were some Third World hellhole. What would have happened then? Could the left have muzzled its joy? Enough of them on social media bemoaned the fact that it was merely a near miss; think of how they would have celebrated if it were a hit. Think of how the country would have been torn apart.
Was the accursed shooter a lone wolf or something more sinister? There is no answer here because our institutions have provided no answer. The killer’s success without any kind of explanation would have fueled conspiracy theories and shattered any remaining belief in our norms and guardrails. They already tried to bankrupt Trump and then throw him in prison for the rest of his life. The murder of the once and future president would have signaled to the Americans who supported him that they would never be allowed to govern themselves. That, in turn, could have very well led to even more unspeakable conflict (My new novel, “American Apocalypse: The Second Civil War,” which discusses exactly that scenario, arrives July 17, 2025 – preorder it or you hate America!).
The fact is that Donald Trump did something miraculous. He came from outside politics and won the presidency. It was taken from him in a disputed election, and the full weight of the government waged lawfare upon him to destroy him forever. But he beat them back, won the Republican primary, and survived not one but two attempts to murder him even as he defeated two Democrat candidates in 2024. Oh, and there’s more. He brought along the House and the Senate, then scored win after win during his scorched earth first 180 days, culminating with the Big Beautiful Bill’s passage even as our generational enemy Iran tried to put out the smoldering ruins of the nuke program he annihilated in an evening.
That’s not just luck. That’s not just skill. That’s something more. As Otto von Bismarck said, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Providence did not just save Donald Trump. Providence may have also saved the United States of America.