The Truth in Butler

a review of Butler by Selena Zito

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Pictures of text are screenshots from the Kindle version.

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“But the backroads drive provides a kaleidoscope of Pennsylvania’s riches—and it serves as a microcosm of rural America in terms of culture, pace, values, and way of life. If you understand the voters of Indiana, Cambria, Erie, Luzerne, Somerset, Bedford, York, Bucks, and Lancaster Counties of Pennsylvania, well, then you really understand what is going on in the country.” — from page 119 of the Kindle version

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Salena Zito has spent the last decade becoming one of the only reporters in America who consistently understood Donald Trump’s political rise—not just the headlines, but the emotional logic behind it.

Her now-famous line from 2016, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally,” remains the single most clarifying sentence ever written about the Trump phenomenon. And in my opinion, it may be the most brilliantly written single sentence in all of American political science.

It’s also proof that Zito doesn’t just observe the country—she listens to it.

Butler, her new book about the 2024 assassination attempt, is a natural extension of that same clarity: on-the-ground, unsentimental, and uncommonly attuned to the currents that shape real lives.

That understanding is no accident. Zito is from the Butler, Pennsylvania area herself, with deep family roots stretching back generations—steelworkers, small-town lifers, people whose history is embedded in the soil.

That kind of American rootedness is more than a fun fact or what your favorite TA called “local color”; it’s the lens through which Butler is told, and the reason it rings true.

She doesn’t just write about heartland voters—she belongs to them. And that’s what makes her “The Trump Whisperer” in the truest sense: she hears what others don’t. Where legacy media outlets scrambled to find a single person who’d voted for Trump, Zito already knew hundreds.

Her reporting is not parachuted in. It’s native.

And when you read her, you’re not just getting insight into Trump—you’re getting a long-overdue act of translation between the America that votes and the America that writes about it.

What’s striking about Butler—and about Zito’s work in general—is that she does not suffer from the positive strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome. She’s not a sycophant. She doesn’t glorify him. She’s simply the rare reporter who doesn’t suffer from TDS or gain-of-function TDS, either.

But in a media ecosystem where even moderate nuance is rarer than a fact-check at MSNBC, reading her is a genuinely startling experience.

So startling, in fact, that I—someone who understands TDS well enough to have identified and named a gain-of-function mutation of it—had to remind myself periodically that I didn’t need to calibrate for her bias. There wasn’t any to correct for, which is a startling thing for me to hear myself say, but I think it’s true.

She isn’t writing a hagiography. She admits that Harris won the debate and that Trump lost in 2020. She simply writes about the man she knows without the moral exemption clauses that amount to genuflecting towards the need to assure readers she doesn’t support his flaws, vices, and worst excesses.

That’s not a bias; it’s a choice, and one that goes along with the idea that readers should be respected and trusted to, as my dear friend

Josh Slocum

would say, “supply their own not-alls.”

Zito writes with clarity, proximity, and exceptional emotional fluency, and she does it without the allergic overreactions or moral exemption clauses that typify most writing about Trump.

Her gift is not neutrality. It’s discernment.

And that, in this moment, is the rarer virtue. By many orders of magnitude.

When the Narrative Breaks from the Ground

Zito isn’t just filling in the gaps left by national media—she’s indicting the gaps themselves. Butler doesn’t dwell on media failure, but the contrast is inescapable: this book is what journalism is supposed to be. And it only feels radical because most of her peers abandoned the form years ago.

After the assassination attempt, every sane person recognized the gravity of what had happened.

A presidential candidate had nearly been killed on American soil.

His bloodied face was captured in real time, his fist raised.

A man died shielding his family.

It was epochal. Cinematic. A hinge moment in history.

And the legacy media? They blinked. They hedged. They buried it under climate headlines and Pride retrospectives.

Some outlets refused to call it an assassination attempt at all.

Still others slapped “alleged” in front of everything except their own confusion.

This wasn’t just slow reporting. It was avoidance.

A willful refusal to treat the moment with moral clarity—because moral clarity would have required them to face something unthinkable: that the man they’d spent eight years mocking, shaming, and catastrophizing had become the victim of the very violence they insisted he incited.

Apparently the real assassination attempt was the friends we made along the way.

Zito never says this outright. She doesn’t have to. She just walks you through what actually happened—who was there, how they responded, what changed. And the weight of her clarity makes the national coverage feel grotesque by comparison.

Not because it was incorrect, but because it was irrelevant.

The media didn’t miss the story. They replaced it.

They replaced it with a thousand thumb-sucking thinkpieces about “the normalization of political violence,” none of which acknowledged the role their own rhetoric played in normalizing it.

They ran headlines wondering “whether Trump would exploit the moment,” even as he was still bleeding. They treated the crowd's cheers as a threat rather than a grief response.

And within a week, they'd largely moved on.

Meanwhile, in working-class towns across Pennsylvania, Zito saw something different. She saw Trump signs sprouting overnight—on rowhouses, diners, even apartment balconies in majority-black neighborhoods that hadn’t supported him before.

She saw flags in truck beds and windows. Makeshift memorials. Prayer groups.

The media kept asking if the assassination attempt would “move the needle.”

Zito saw the needle already buried deep in the heart of places the media never visit.

This is why her work matters. Because she doesn’t just get Trump right—she gets the people who vote for him right.

And that, more than anything, is what legacy media can’t tolerate.

Because to get those people right would mean accepting that they aren’t stupid or brainwashed or filled with hate.

They’re rational.

They’re observant.

They know who abandoned them.

They remember who called them irredeemable, deplorable, garbage.

They know the difference between a performance and a presence.

And so does Zito.

She shows you how easily trust can be shattered by an elite class that reports on America as if it’s a foreign country.

She captures the corrosion of faith in institutions—not because people were manipulated into losing trust, but because they were gaslit when they tried to keep it.

She shows us the reporters who ignore entire towns unless there’s a white supremacy narrative to exploit. The ones who travel with her to rural Pennsylvania but don’t look up from their phones long enough to hear what anyone says.

It’s not journalism. It’s stenography for a worldview.

Zito doesn’t rail against that world. She simply leaves it behind.

And what she brings back is a rare thing: a clear picture of America as it actually exists, not as the New York Times editorial board wishes it would behave.

The People’s President, Up Close

The real gift of Butler isn’t just the minute-by-minute recounting of the assassination attempt—it’s what that event revealed about the man at its center. And here, Zito delivers something far more valuable than yet another Trump profile: she captures the connection.

The web of ordinary people who showed up to Madison Avenue in Butler, Pennsylvania that day—their stories, their struggles, their reasons for standing in the sun for hours just to see him—are woven into the book like threads in a tapestry. This isn’t myth-making. It’s context-creating.

One especially poignant thread: the woman from a multi-generational Democratic family who finally led her entire household in switching sides—not out of anger, but exhaustion. They had played by the rules, worked hard, kept showing up to vote blue…and nothing ever got better. No jobs. No stability. No recognition. Just more slogans and less dignity.

Trump saw them. She felt that. And her story, like many others in Butler, doesn’t come with fireworks or fanfare—it comes with clarity. She’s not angry. She’s done being patient.

Zito reveals that the ordinary citizens who took the stage at the 2024 Republican National Convention were Trump’s idea. He wanted their stories front and center. Not celebrities. Not polished politicians. Just Americans.

And those moments, seen from behind the curtain and through Zito’s interviews, show a Trump who is moved—genuinely, unguardedly—by the stories of people who see him as their last, best shot.

That’s not something his critics are prepared to acknowledge. Hell, I wasn’t prepared for it. I’ve criticized Trump harshly, both on policy and character. But this book reminded me—again and again—that underneath the bluster is a man with an almost uncanny ability to feel when someone is giving him their last hope.

And he responds to that. Not as a strategy. As a reflex.

It’s not redemption. But it is humanization.

And it lands harder because Zito never tries to force it. She just shows you who these people are—and how he hears them. And in doing so, she shows you something rare: not the myth, not the monster, but the man.

The Only Misstep

If there’s a flaw in Butler, it’s the short section that tries to unpack the motives of the would-be assassin. It’s not that Zito gets anything wrong—but the inclusion feels oddly disconnected from the rest of the book’s tone and insight. We don’t need a deep psychological profile of the shooter. We’ve lived through nearly a decade of relentless Trump Derangement Syndrome and now its turbocharged cousin, gain-of-function TDS.

The real mystery isn’t why a brainwashed 20-year-old would try to kill Trump—it’s why more haven’t. When you spend eight years telling young people that the republic is one election away from fascism, that voting is broken, and that resistance must be physical; well, what did you think was going to happen?

The shooter is not the story. The story is that America’s institutions normalized violence as a political correction mechanism.

And Zito is at her strongest when she focuses not on pathology but on consequence. When she zooms in on the aftermath—on the flags that sprouted, the walls that cracked, the voters who woke up changed—that’s when the book sings.

The shooter is a footnote. Butler is about everyone else.

The Campaign That Wasn’t

The only other soft spot in the book lies with the Harris/Walz campaign coverage—and not because Zito loses her touch, but because the campaign itself had none. The events are performative. The messaging is hollow. The stops at places like Sheetz and Primanti Brothers read like set pieces in a rebooted Veep, only less coherent. Harris’s campaign strategy seems predicated on the assumption that aesthetics will do the job of connection.

They don’t. And they didn’t.

This hollowness isn’t just a Democratic problem. It’s a symptom of elite detachment. But Zito’s skill is in showing it, not merely stating it.

You see the contrast between Harris’s team staging photos and Trump’s team inviting actual people.

You see the difference between a consultant-crafted slogan and a woman quietly saying, “If he can take a bullet, surely I can wear a hat.”

A Man Who Remembers

One of the most affecting sections of the book is Trump’s return to Butler.

That section focuses on both the emotions of the moment and his tribute to Corey Comperatore—the fire chief who died shielding his family during the assassination attempt.

Trump planned every detail of the memorial, from the ten-second silence to the operatic rendition of Ave Maria. Not as campaign theater, but as an act of reverence. This wasn’t optics. This was grief—and gratitude.

And the fact that he got choked up discussing it, that his voice softened when describing Corey’s last moments, tells you more about the man than any profile ever could.

He wanted to make something beautiful in Corey’s honor. And I found that beautiful too.

Not Who I Thought He Was

I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect to be moved.

I’ve never been under any illusion about Donald Trump’s flaws. I’ve criticized his recklessness, his narcissism, his lack of discipline, and about a hundred other things—some of them printable. I’ve rolled my eyes so hard I gave myself a headache. I’ve cringed.

Out loud. Often.

And yet.

Reading Butler, I realized something uncomfortable: I, too, had internalized more media framing than I thought. I, too, had absorbed a version of Trump that was flattened, filtered, and shaped by people who wouldn’t share a room with anyone who’d voted for him.

I thought I was immune. I wasn’t.

I’ve acknowledged that he has remarkable courage. You don’t get up with a bullet wound still bleeding and shout “Fight, fight, fight” without it.

But Butler showed me something beyond courage—it showed me a kind of loyalty. A memory for people who matter.

A reflex to honor, not just perform.

It showed me a man who doesn’t forget those who give him their last hope. And whether or not you think he deserves that hope is beside the fucking point.

The point is that he hears it. And he carries it.

And when he gets it right—when he’s tender, or reverent, or quietly resolute—he does so with a kind of authenticity that no amount of gold-plated bluster can counterfeit.

He’s not perfect. He’s not even close.

But he’s not who I thought he was, either.

And if someone like me—someone who was skeptical long before it was fashionable, and critical long after it was convenient, particularly given the shape and tastes of my readership—can admit that, then maybe that is the real story.

Not that he’s flawless.

But that he's real.

And that’s what Zito captures better than anyone else. Not the myth. Not the meme. Not the messiah or the menace.

Just the man.

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If that moment moved you as well, and if you’d like a visual keepsake of it, I’m offering a limited-edition print of my drawing of Trump’s moment in Butler, featuring his raised fist, bloodied ear, and the flag behind him in full color. It’s part of my DIY Student Loan Exorcism—and your support goes directly toward making more work like this possible. Prints available here; if you’d like to save on shipping by getting more than just this print, my full offerings (including a pay-what-you-want Texas bluebonnet) are shown here.