The Story of How PA Turned Red—But Will It Last?
Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland, by Salena Zito (Center Street, 256 pp., $20.28)
On July 13, 2024, a youthful, bespectacled assassin’s bullets cut the hot air above the Butler Farm Show grounds and grazed the ear below Donald Trump’s wispy, straw-like hair. In those seconds, a volunteer firefighter, Corey Comperatore, was killed; two spectators were gravely wounded; and a former president, blood streaking down his cheek, rose and mouthed, “Fight, fight, fight,” an image that fixed itself in the national mind. Veteran Rust Belt reporter Salena Zito was in the “buffer” near the stage – close enough to feel “the velocity” and see the blood as Trump ducked behind the podium – and her reconstruction of those moments is taut, humane, and unsparing about institutional failure.
Butler is not a true-crime book and it is not a campaign chronicle. It is a report from a political realignment as it crests, a dispatch from what Zito argues is the decisive reshaping of Pennsylvania’s electorate and, by extension, the country’s. The work opens with a framing device that sounds at first like local color: George Washington, trudging the colonial wilderness near what is now Butler County, nearly shot by a guide at “fifteen paces,” a miss Zito says changed the continent. There would have been “no General Washington, no President Washington,” she writes, “if that bullet had been only an inch closer.” Then she turns to her own near-miss: “Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.” The onomatopoeic device is unsubtle, but it earns its keep. Across two and a half centuries, an inch again separates calamity and the story we tell about it.
Zito’s strengths are the ones that made her indispensable in 2016: proximity to the big man himself, repetition of eternal verities about the nature of this declining region, humility about what she does not know, and an ear for how people actually talk in western Pennsylvania. Her treatment of the Secret Service’s failures, which draws on the House task force report, the public record, and meticulous interviews, is the most thorough I’ve encountered to date. The bipartisan task force found “several decision points that, if handled differently, could have prevented [21-year-old Thomas Matthew] Crooks from firing eight shots,” beginning with the failure to secure the elevated AGR complex just outside the perimeter. She writes cleanly about the Crooks family’s wrenching 10:56 p.m. call to 911 (“we’re kind of worried”) and the numb suburban stillness on Milford Drive the next day, the Crooks’ home street now “crisscrossed with cracks” and quiet grief.
The book’s leitmotif is not bloodstream politics but presence. Zito argues that “showing up” has become a political program unto itself. She revisits the train derailment victims of East Palestine, where residents told her that Trump’s visit communicated something the White House did not: “unless you understood what it is like to be discarded as not important enough, Trump showing up for us showed he cared.” The case for presence – certainly Zito has been a constant presence around Trump at crucial moments – hardens into a theory of media and message: Americans have lost confidence in national outlets, decamped to podcasts and sidestreams, and refused the old sermonizers. “They had control of the media up until now,” Zito approvingly quotes podcaster Joe Rogan, “[and] this election was the first time they didn’t really have control of the media anymore.”
This is well-trod terrain for those of us who grew up south of Butler along the Monongahela and the Yough — steel and coal towns turned logistics hubs and perhaps even AI server centers, union halls that primarily host local events but still smell like coffee and floor wax. I’m a center-left, labor Democrat from this once-bustling place; my reflex is to fight for the party that built the roads and backed the mines when it counted. Zito knows those reflexes and, to her credit, does not condescend to them. She contends, however, that the coalition moved out from under us while we weren’t watching: “Trump did not create this coalition. He is the result of it … Republicans are now the party of working-class Americans, and Democrats are the party of the elites.”
It’s the bluntest sentence in the book, and the one that will most offend Democrats more given to knee-jerk partisanship. It also captures the felt reality of places like Butler, Beaver, Armstrong, and Washington counties – the last of those being my home county – where party ID now follows the vibes on the shop floor, X newsfeed, and the evangelical church parking lot rather than the union newsletter or a ward captain’s palm card. Zito is careful to show how the shift began earlier than 2016. Barack Obama’s western Pennsylvania slippage, from 2008 high-water marks to a 2012 map with fewer voters and attrition in Allegheny, Beaver, Westmoreland, and Cambria, should have been a warning. I and others argued at the time that it was; no one listened.
Her narrative of how the near-assassination hardened the realignment is convincing. The “chart saved his life” detail – the slide on immigration that caused Trump to turn his head – is both vivid and, after the Associated Press reconstruction, hard to dismiss. Had the heavyset septuagenarian not turned just so, Zito writes, “one of the shots fired at 6:11 p.m. likely would have hit the base of his skull and killed him.” If you are inclined to roll your eyes at Trump-era hagiography, brace yourself: the account makes a tighter case than you might expect. The book’s best pages are the quiet ones where Zito lavishes attention on place: the emptied fairgrounds, wheelchairs and hats left in the dust; the Buffalo Township fireman’s jacket set above the stands when Trump returned in October.
Still, a reviewer has to press where the rhetoric outruns the record. Zito’s “elites vs. working class” binary is descriptively powerful but analytically suspect, at least on some points. It blurs important fractures inside both coalitions: racial and generational divides among working-class voters, education splits among suburban women, the different moral economies of exurban gun culture and Black urban labor. Even within her frame, Butler County is not the state. The book reports, correctly, that Butler turned out at 83% and gave Trump 65%. But that county has been mahogany-red for years. The real story is whether places that used to throw blue lifelines – Erie, Luzerne, Northampton, even slices of Bucks – keep trending right and by how much. Zito offers a journalist’s contemporaneous read from the Republican war room (“By 10:00 p.m., I knew he’d won Pennsylvania”) and notes the crumble of old Democratic firewall counties. That’s hardly proof of permanence, but it is a fair rendering of momentum.
On media, Zito leans hard into a thesis that mixes nostalgia and indictment. By her account, local news hollowed out; national desks clustered “in the same super zip codes of wealth and power”; a press corps that mistakes its social circle for the country. The historical sketches – Watergate to today, Gallup and Pew numbers – support the loss-of-trust story; the broader claims (Rogan as inflection point, “psy-op” language) feel more atmospheric than causal. Even so, anyone who has worked a picket line in this region knows how much damage high-status incuriosity did to the Democratic brand. If you cover Normalville in Fayette County from a gorgeous row house in Georgetown, you are going to miss half the plot. Zito’s description of what local newsrooms used to do and what, to her credit, she still does may read like sepia, but it maps to a real civic loss.
Where the book persuades most is in its accumulation of voices. A Bethel Park father’s steady 911 cadence; a Butler woman’s shaky hands; a Mahoning Valley crowd testing whether J.D. Vance “saw them” before Trump ever picked him, and deciding, in a razor-thin Senate race against Jim Traficant protege Tim Ryan, he did. Zito’s craft consists less of making a sustained logical argument and more of compiling enough particulars that dissent begins to look like denial. Such a method can flatten complexity, but it’s also the best tool we have for catching a coalition in motion. Her closing line from Rep. Mike Kelly’s world is the right one: “There will be a reckoning for our institutions and that includes our press.” I sure hope not, but things aren’t looking good.
Two additional points deserve a gentle corrective. First, the claim that “Republicans are now the party of working-class Americans” is truer than it once was, but it is truest among non-college whites and a growing share of non-college Hispanics and men; it is less true, as incumbent Black Pittsburgh mayor Ed Gainey’s tough loss to Corey O’Connor showed, among service-sector Black voters in Allegheny and among some public-sector union members who remain the Democratic core. Zito registers multiracial Trump crowds at PPL Center in Allentown but doesn’t fully explore how durable those gains are, or how much they owe to idiosyncratic candidate effects (Trump’s boundless celebrity, Harris’s innumerable liabilities, a Biden-to-Harris handoff that sapped energy). Second, the book’s account of media “control” understates how fractured the partisan content economy already was even by 2016. The Rogan download numbers have been so impressive for so long that the conclusion that 2024 marks some kind of singular break is overdetermined.
Now for the part that pains an old mill-Democrat to concede. On balance, Zito is right about the big thing. If you grew up where I did, you learned that politics follows place. The places that once formed the Democratic Party’s material core and moral heart have been migrating away from it, less over “culture war” than over status, respect, and the language of work. Zito quotes a Weirton-to-Butler family for whom leaving the Democrats “was like leaving the Catholic Church,” an “awakening” catalyzed by the dignity-of-work pitch. In their minds, they didn’t change. The parties did.
The Butler moment helps fuse that drift to an emblem. Trump later told Zito, whose access to the man himself is unparalleled, that Butler’s people “represent all that is good about America.” That’s cornball campaigner talk, to be sure. The more important line in the book is Zito’s own observation that Butler’s way of life “will likely remain distant and probably misunderstood by the national media.” In our politics, misunderstood places are powerful. They are where voters test whether parties respect them enough to listen – and in 2024, Republicans gave the distinct impression that they were better listeners.
Whither the Keystone State? This is the question that haunted me as I read Zito’s afterword, watching her follow returns from Erie, Luzerne, and Northampton and knowing, as I did from my own texts that night and prior cautionary articles on the election, that the map was tilting. If the state’s old Democratic map once ran down the Mon Valley and across Allegheny’s ring, the new Republican map now runs up 79, over 80, and into the smaller cities where people still feel anchored to a place even as the old jobs vanish. Democrats can still win Pennsylvania – I’ve explained how Chris Deluzio, John Fetterman, and Josh Shapiro have all provided different yet related paths to working-class victory – yet the default setting has flipped. Unless other Democrats relearn a big-tent language of work and rootedness that is heard as something other than a graduate-seminar gloss on “investment,” 2024 will read, in retrospect, like 2016 did for the Buckeye State: the last creaking of the hinge before the door swings shut and locks for a long, long time.
Zito’s book will not persuade readers who still need a Marvel Cinematic Universe villain to explain 2024. It will convince those who want to understand why the people who once voted with me and my parents now vote against us without believing they’ve betrayed anything, indeed they’ve been betrayed instead. The closing pages, where she tallies the institutional reckoning (Secret Service, media, party establishments) and insists that “nothing is going back to the way it was,” should serve as a sign of hard times to come.
The Butler gunfire made a symbol out of something that had been happening for years in school-board races, township meetings, and union endorsements. My hometown flipped (and flipped out) over the course of a decade and national reporters did take notice. Even so, symbols matter. If Ohio was the wake-up that Democrats kept hitting snooze on, Butler is the expired smoke detector battery that people refuse to change. I don’t write that with relish. But when the owl of Minerva finally takes flight, there’s a strong chance we will be remembering Butler as the moment Pennsylvania turned, if not immediately, then inexorably, into the next Ohio. Zito has written a convincing account of why.
