Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
Appearances
j
john mcardle
cspan00:55
s
salena zito
00:36
Clips
b
bob vylan
00:15
donald j trump
admin00:02
?
Voice
Speaker
Time
Text
Rush Back, Rush Out00:08:58
unidentified
House Republican leaders changed the floor schedule after the Rules Committee recessed to block Democrats from offering amendments involving the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
This is the last work week in the House before its scheduled August break.
Watch live coverage when lawmakers return here on C-SPAN.
C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered.
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So it's really important that you ask that question because places like Butler, you know, there's only ever been two presidents that have ever campaigned for president in Butler, and the other one was JFK.
unidentified
These are the places that often decide election cycles, but they're very far off from the, you know, sort of main places like D.C. or New York.
But they offer a different venue for the president to be able to make his case or whoever's running to make their case.
Josh Shapiro, John Fetterman, Dave McCormick, they're also elected officials that understand the importance of place.
It's situated right along the Ohio border.
Erie's to the north.
Pittsburgh is to the south.
So all of that makes sense in terms of if you're trying to appeal to the middle of the state or the middle of the country, it gives something for voters to have an association with because they see their place through the eyes of the people of Butler.
My family, not the Italian side, the Scottish side, were one of the first founding families of Butler County in the 1750s.
unidentified
So it's also near and dear to my heart.
The morning started out, if people look at the cover of the book, my daughter is a photojournalist.
She took that cover photo.
We started out that we were going to interview President Trump for five minutes before the event.
Chris Lasavita, who was his co-campaign chair, had called and said, hey, you know, you have an interview.
I requested one.
You have an interview five minutes right before.
I have interviewed President Trump several times.
I knew it was going to be a little longer than five minutes, just because he loves to talk about Pennsylvania.
That quickly changed, which, by the way, is not all that unusual.
And as a reporter, things change all the time.
You never really set out that morning and have accomplished what was on your list by the end of the day.
That changed about midday, and they said, We're running late.
Can we please do the interview after the rally?
That call came from Susie Wiles, who was the other co-campaign chair and who's today's chief of staff at the White House.
I said, Sure.
And about an hour before the president came on, I get a phone call from Susie Wiles, and she says, So, how would you feel about flying to Bedminster and doing the interview on his plane?
And I thought, Well, I'll have a lot more time.
And they said they would get me back, my daughter and I back.
So that's the decision we all came to.
About six minutes before the president was set to go out, he had already landed.
He was in Butler.
He was in behind the stage in an area that's called the Click area.
It's called that because this is where the president meets with local first responders, law enforcement, community leaders, grabs some people out of the rally and just talk to them about their lives, thanks them for their service.
In fact, Mark Vogel's mom was there.
He was the Western Pennsylvania teacher who was held in Russia for several years, and she was asking him to please do whatever he could, if he won, to get her son released.
The buffer is the area between the stage that the president walks out on and the people that are attending the rally.
unidentified
Mostly it's used for photojournalists and Secret Service.
So he comes out, we follow him out.
If you look at the cover of the book, my daughter took that as he's coming out.
And that cover has significance.
And I'll tell you about that in a minute.
But if you take a look at it, and you can see it's not, it's a photo of the back of him looking at the people attending the rally.
So we go out and Picard had told us, make sure you end up over on the side so when the motorcade is ready to leave, we can just grab you.
So that's what I did.
The president comes out, he comes out to the song, and two things happen simultaneously, which rarely happen, if at all.
A chart comes out.
And I thought, what does he think?
He's Ross Perot.
Like, he never has a chart.
And if he does have the chart, it's at the end and it's on the other side of him.
I've covered enough Trump rallies to know that.
It's very rare.
If it does happen, it happens at the end.
And the other thing that happens, and this is the significance of the cover, President Trump never turns his head away from the people attending the rally.
It is a very transactional relationship.
He feeds off of them and they feed off of him.
This sort of connective tissue that happens.
And now he may turn his body to face different parts of a rally, but he never turns his neck away.
However, he did.
He turns his neck away when the chart comes down, and that's when the four shots went overhead.