Salena Zito, just four feet from Trump when shots rang out at his July 2024 Butler rally, witnessed his shift from insecurity to unshakable resolve, declaring "fight, fight, fight" as a symbol of leadership. Her annual cross-country travels reveal how Trump’s 2023 East Palestine visit, Butler rally, and Pittsburgh U.S. Steel deal mobilized rural voters—suburban moms, minorities, and young people—ignored by coastal media’s 40% Democratic bias and manufactured racial narratives. Zito highlights Trump’s revival of heartland industries like steel and AI energy as a "new industrial revolution," contrasting it with elite media’s focus on Manhattan trading. Her book, now optioned for a film, argues coastal journalists miss America’s real pulse, where economic revival over political labels defines loyalty. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Selena Zito, a fantastic journalist and the author of Butler, The Untold Story of the Near Assination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland.
One of the reasons I just love reading Selena Zito is because one of the great lies of our dying mainstream media was always this.
They would always say, well, you can be a left-winger and still cover the news fairly.
And that is true as it's spoken, but it's not true as it's lived because if you are surrounded by other left-wingers, you have something called group polarization, where you just all become more and more left-wing.
If you were in a newsroom, and I've been working in newsrooms where people have different opinions, then yes, then you tend to be fair and you tend to correct each other.
But the fact that the news media is hugely, hugely biased toward the left, about 40% of journalists openly identify as Democrats.
The rest are lying.
About 10% maybe are openly identify as Republicans and then are quickly fired.
But not only that, beyond that, they almost all live on the coasts.
They almost all live in New York, D.C., and California.
And that's especially true as the small papers and the small venues have died.
I mean, newspapers died.
It wasn't kind of a conspiracy.
It was just the internet took their classified ads away.
And so they had no way of funding.
When I was a small town newspaperman, I had five competitors and we were fighting for stories about school boards.
And so people now, journalists now no longer know how anybody lives outside of the coast.
Selena Zito broke that mold.
And because of that, she saw Donald Trump's first victory coming when almost no one else did.
She gets outside New York and the Beltway and she brags about the fact that her Jeep has 400,000 miles on it.
And on my birthday in 2024, she was standing four feet away from Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, when an assassin's bullet nearly took off Trump's head.
She was in close contact with him after that, and she's written a book about it.
As I say, it's called Butler, The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland.
She is a political reporter for the Washington Examiner, excellent place, and a regular contributor to the Washington Post.
Selena, it's good to see you again.
How are you doing?
So nice to see you.
Thank you so much.
And really, that intro, when you honed in on where journalists are from, but also all of our cultural curators.
What do I mean by that?
Newspapers, corporations, media, institutions, academia, sports, where are they all located in our super zip codes in this country?
They curate, they curate in our culture and tell us what to listen to, what to read, what is appropriate and what isn't.
And in the last 10 years, it has been such a division of what people in the middle of the country believe is normal and traditional and acceptable.
And what those curicultural curators have said, no, you can't do things that way.
That's not how you do it.
You do it the way we do it.
And so all those people in boardrooms and newsrooms, they all share that same belief system.
It's not that they're bad, but they don't know the people that they're either trying to get to read their stories or they're covering or they're selling their products to or they're trying to get their butts in their seats or send their kids off to college or go to their think tank.
They're so disconnected from each other.
That pressure was just building and building.
Hear His Transformation00:13:45
And all it needed was something that was willing to disrupt it that Trump came along.
Yeah, because I that's what the whole book is about.
You know, I remember when I was a kid, I hoboed around the country for years and it was an awakening because I was a coastal kid and I suddenly met all these people.
And one thing I noticed about them is they were they were kind of intimidated by the intellectuals in New York and they would almost always start these sentences with, you know, I'm not an educated person, but and then they'd say something really brilliant and insightful.
And you think like, you know, you shouldn't be intimidated.
And I think they use that to intimidate them into agreeing with them and trying to make them think that Trump was a bad guy.
I have to ask you, this has been covered to death, so I don't want to only talk about this, but you're standing four feet away from Trump when the gun goes off.
Tell me a little bit about that experience.
So I had just seen him a couple minutes before he went on the stage.
He wanted to say hi to me.
The day had changed back and forth.
I was going to interview him before the event, the rally, then after the event.
And finally, it was decided I was going to fly to Bedminster and do the interview on the plane.
My daughter and my son-in-law were with me.
My daughter is a photojournalist.
My son-in-law, poor guy, we dragged him to carry all the equipment so we wouldn't look sweaty because it was 100 degrees.
That didn't work.
Five minutes in the Butler farm fields and we were a mess.
But nonetheless, he had decided, you know, hey, let's go, let's do a long interview on the plane.
Fine, that's what we were going to do.
Right before he went out, though, he said he wanted to say hi to me.
Now I've interviewed the president a dozen of times, dozens of times.
So we say hi right before he goes out, asked about my grandchildren.
We talk about grandchildren.
It was a very personal conversation.
It wasn't a political conversation.
So it was very nice.
And then they couldn't get the three of us back to the press riser.
The little well that took us between each places was now shut.
So Michelle Picard III, his campaign front guy, said, okay, just stay in the buffer.
President's going to come out.
And the music had already started.
He goes, all right, Lee Greenwood was playing.
So he's like, okay, you go out, take your photos, end up over on the other side.
We obeyed.
That's how we got the cover of Butler.
My daughter took that shot.
And that shot is very, very meaningful.
And I'll explain that to you in a minute because it's not the face of Donald Trump.
It's not Donald Trump being shot.
It's that connective tissue between the people that he came to see him and him with them.
So we get out there, we work our way over to the other side, and he does something he never does in the beginning of a rally.
If he ever does it, he does it at the end.
And he does it on the other side of him.
A chart comes down.
And I remember saying to my daughter, what does he think he is, Ross Perot?
Like, he's not a chart guy.
Chart comes down.
He starts talking about, you see that small portion?
That's when I was president.
That's when there was the lowest number of crossings at the border.
And he turns his neck.
Well, that's also why that cover is important.
If you've ever gone to a Trump rally, Or if you've ever watched it in great detail, he never turns his neck away from who's ever at the rally.
Now, he may turn his body to face other directions.
Never turns his head away, ever.
And chart comes down.
See, the relationship between him and the people attending is very transactional.
He feeds off of them.
They feed off of him.
It's very, it's all about respecting the moment.
Turns his neck and four shots go right over my head.
I saw him get hit.
I saw him jump.
I saw him grab his ear.
I saw the blood streak across his face.
That was what it was right away.
Immediately.
And the only thing that made me not like instantly freak out was that I saw that he took himself down.
I was like, he might be okay.
He was definitely hit, but he might be okay.
Within the seconds, he's covered by six or seven new Secret Service agents.
At that same time, four more shots go off over my head.
And it was in that moment that Picard, the campaign aide, took me down because I kept working.
I don't know why.
It never occurred to me that I might get hurt.
Never.
Never crossed my mind.
I knew my daughter was okay because I saw my son-in-law take her down and cover her.
But I'm like, I have purpose.
I have a gift God gave me.
I'm a good writer.
I need to chronicle this.
This is history.
Remember everything happening in layers in my brain.
Like, okay, I have to do my job.
Okay, I have to stay aware.
Okay, I have to take this all in, what's happening around me.
And that's what I did.
And then Picard took me down.
Now, I could see just the weird angle.
And in some places, you can see on some videos, I'm told that you can see that happen.
I don't want to watch it.
I've never watched it.
I don't want to relive that.
I came out okay.
I want to stay okay.
I can see the president.
I can see his face.
I can hear him talking.
I have the recorder on my phone.
Now, you probably wonder, well, why are you recording a rally?
Well, when people talk, there's nuance and emotion in their voices that often isn't picked up when it's written.
It's written in a very one-dimensional way.
If you don't express as a writer how they are expressing what they're saying, other meanings can take hold.
That goes for the average person I talk to or a president.
It doesn't matter.
So my recorder was on.
I completely forgot that until later.
I hear the whole entire conversation between the president and the Secret Service.
I hear that the shooter is down.
I hear that they want him to stand up.
I hear him, I'm not standing up without my shoes on, which was actually almost made me smile because I'm like, oh, that is the most Trump.
And then the crowd starts chanting USA.
I can see the president saying it himself.
I can't hear him say it, but I can see him mouthing it.
He gets up, and that's when he turns and they want to take him off the stage.
He goes, wait, And he turns around and does fight, fight, fight.
And then he comes down right past me.
His Make America Great Hat.
I remember this so vividly.
It just falls in slow motion.
It wasn't on his head anymore.
It was in sort of the crux of an agent's arm, just like landing slowly right beside my face.
Dan Scavino was behind me.
I was aware that someone was behind me, but I wasn't aware that it was him until much later.
He ended up grabbing the hat, which I'm so glad that he did.
And he would tell me later, he called me the next morning early in the morning, this President Trump, and explained to me why he said fight, fight, fight.
But the first thing he said to me in the morning was, I didn't even get to say anything.
He said, Selena, this is Donald Trump, right?
Like, I don't know it's you.
I want to make sure that you're okay, your daughter and your son-in-law are okay.
And he remembered them by name.
And I really want to apologize for not doing that interview.
And then I swore like a truck driver and said, are you bleeping kidding me, sir?
You've just been shot.
I'm good.
Okay.
We would have, he would call me seven times that morning, that day.
Really?
Called me seven times.
We had very profound conversations about faith, about he kept questioning, why did I turn my head, Selena?
And I guess if I were someone else, I would have pressed him like a different reporter.
But I could tell he was trying to figure things out.
And I was too.
And I thought he needed space.
So I gave it to him.
And we just talked about, you know, why did I do that?
I never do that.
I can't remember making that decision.
I didn't make that decision.
Why did that happen?
It always led back to the hand of God.
You know, I don't know.
I may be imposing this.
I've never met Donald Trump, but he does seem different to me now.
I mean, he's extraordinarily different.
Yeah.
He's very, very, very different.
Can you describe how?
Well, first of all, there is, I'll tell, I'll give you the first example of knowing how he's changed.
Okay.
He said to me that the last phone call we had that day, he's getting on the plane.
He's going to Milwaukee.
They've made the decision.
He calls me one last time.
And he says, I said, sorry, I got to ask you one thing.
Why did you say fight, fight, fight?
He said, well, I wasn't Donald Trump in that moment.
I represented the presidency of the United States, of every president, every man that's ever held that position.
And all that it means, the grit, the getting up when you get knocked down, the exceptionalism.
It was very important that I project that we go on.
We're strong.
We're going to make it.
That was my obligation.
He said it was also my obligation because I didn't want the 50,000 people there freaking out if I'm carted off on the stretcher.
Right.
And I didn't want people watching that, maybe going into the streets.
I had an obligation when you hold that office to project strength at all times.
That was my first clue as to that he understood purpose, that it was a higher level of purpose than his first term.
And nothing was going to get in his way.
for the next this, if he won, it was nothing was going to get in his way.
Not the drama of DC, not whatever happens with the CIA or State Department or whatever.
Nothing, his political enemies.
It didn't matter.
He was saved that day and he has a different purpose than he had ever had before.
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How did you let that go this long?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
You know, it sounds ridiculous to say that he seems more confident because he's always seemed a very confident person, but a lot of what came across to me as belligerence seems gone because belligerence always kind of marks a little bit of insecurity.
I think you're trying to make a big noise to make people stay away.
But now he just seems to kind of have this absolute certainty that is very, it's very appealing in a president, I think.
You know, it makes you feel like confidence.
Inflection Point Observed00:10:57
Yeah.
And it's purpose.
When we don't have purpose in life, we are lost at sea.
Oh, that's true.
Even if we don't know that.
But if we know and understand what our purpose is, even if we don't accomplish everything that we want to that day, that hour, that minute, whatever it may be.
But if we know the next day we still have that purpose, we are much better at everything that we do.
Yeah.
So that's Trump.
But I want to talk a little bit while we have time about the people you meet in the rest of the country where all the other journalists aren't going.
You know, I have been both amazed and disgustingly gleeful at the success of this administration.
I mean, it just seems to me an amazing administration.
And I think it's even more amazing than Trump's fans realize.
You know, I mean, like, I'm an America fan.
I just think it's going great for America and he's doing a great job.
But the polls don't really reflect that.
People are saying, well, he's being too harsh with the deportations and all that.
What are you hearing on the ground?
People are so happy.
They are.
Yeah.
It's like I straddled two different worlds.
If I step onto X or not Facebook as much, but if I step into X or I put cable news on, it's as though I have entered a different dimension that I'm still part of, but is so wildly different than what I see in the middle of the country.
I'm based in Pennsylvania.
You know, I cover Pennsylvania, but I also cover Ohio, West Virginia.
I'm ready to make my cross-country trip starting next week.
We'll all go all the way out west, come back, and then go all the way through the South, down into Mississippi.
And I do this every year.
I don't fly.
I don't take the interstate.
I only take back roads.
And it really helps me understand the most important people in the country because they're the ones that decide elections.
Nobody in New York will ever decide who becomes president.
No one in DC will or LA will ever decide who becomes president.
It's what the people on the ground see.
And the way I saw America change, I would say that there were three big points in this election cycle where I saw the coalition broaden, right?
More young people, more Blacks, more Hispanics, not only joining the coalition, but proudly so.
And young people, oh my gosh, the amount of young people that I see unironically wearing MAGA hats is just astounding to me.
But I also saw all throughout the election.
So the first inflection point happened in February of 2023.
The primary scuffling had started in the New Hampshire poll.
Trump was down to run DeSantis.
People were still a little bit irritated about the 2022 midterms.
They had a level of expectation that they were going to win the Senate majority.
They didn't.
Trump had not been talking about aspirational qualities.
He'd been more talking about grievances.
And so it wasn't as appealing.
So he was the lowest point.
It was February.
Oh my gosh, I'm going to forget the date.
February 13th, I think it was.
He shows up in East Palestine, Ohio.
Nobody else did.
Him and JD Vance.
There had been, I think, 432 White House press events that had gone out, press releases that had gone out between February 2nd and that date from the Biden White House.
The town was never even mentioned.
If people don't remember, that is where the train derailment happened.
He shows up.
It is sleet, like Appalachian sleet, right?
Grace Clive, snow, rain, everything.
It was ugly out.
You didn't know what were in the puddles that you were walking in.
You know, you didn't know what was in the air.
I covered that extensively.
I would have headaches for days every time I left there.
And he comes rolling in with eight 218 wheelers filled with water for the residents.
He buys McDonald's for all the first responders.
But more importantly, he walked around town.
He had galoshes on.
They were Carthart.
Nonetheless, they were galoshes.
And his pants were tucked in them and he has big like overcoat on.
And he just talked to people and listened to them.
And he didn't then did a press conference and he said, I see you.
I'm here for you.
I will be back.
You will not be forgotten, which by the way, he has lived up to.
He has completely lived up to that.
But that was the inflection point.
Within a week, Trump was ahead in the primaries and it was over.
Second would be Butler.
Butler, you'll read in the book how people, as I'm interviewing people, people that you normally wouldn't expect to be robust sort of MAGA hat, like t-shirt wearing, people, suburban college-educated mothers, C-suite guys in big businesses, young whites, blacks, Hispanics.
Everything changed.
A week later, I'm like, what is going on here?
And I remember interviewing this one young mother, mother of three, college-educated, lived in an upper middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh.
On paper, she should be a liberal.
She should be a Kamala Harris voter.
She had a Trump hat on.
Her name was Chrissy Eckenro.
And I said, Chrissy, I saw her at the soccer field along with like five other young college educated mothers.
They all had Trump hats on.
And she saw the look on my face.
She goes, Yeah, if he can take a bullet from me, I can wear a hat.
And it was this attitude, this aspirational quality that we are part of something bigger than self.
And one of the most important nuances, this is why I hope people read the book, because it is a really important quality that pollsters and strategists, a lot of Republicans and Democrats, but all Democrats and reporters miss.
And that is the importance of place, where you're from, your rootedness.
Six out of 10 young people in this country live five miles away from where they grew up.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think this is something conservatives need to learn about.
I've had a lot of people.
People need to understand this.
Place matters.
Where you're from matters.
It's more important if you're Republican or Democrat.
If you, and that's what was important about Trump.
He tells you, I see you.
Yeah.
When he shows up in East Palestine, it's very much like the book.
Remember the song Allentown by Billy Joel?
Yep.
Okay.
I'm old.
I was there in the 70s when everything died.
Yeah.
Right?
Everything.
And he's sitting against the steel beam and he's talking about the loss of jobs and community and how everything was just spreading apart and nothing was the same anymore.
And people all over the country sang along with that song with emotion, not because they're all from Allentown, but because they saw it happening in all of their towns.
That is Trump's gift in showing up in places like East Palestine or Butler.
Nobody, no president other than JFK has ever gone to Butler.
Let me interrupt you here because I want to ask you something about your you were the first person to one of the very few people to say that you thought that Trump had a chance.
What are you thinking about the midterms now?
I think Republicans are in a good place.
Yeah.
I mean, because everybody's saying, you know, the big, beautiful bill, everybody's unhappy.
They're losing their Medicare.
No one's unhappy.
I don't know who people are talking to.
People are very hopeful.
And also, people expect to get about 65 to 70 percent satisfaction from the guy or girl they vote for.
They don't expect 100% because they don't get 100% in anything from their life.
Let me ask you another question.
When I read your first book, and I'm sorry, I've forgotten the name.
The Great Revolt.
Yes.
And I remember you talking about race in the country.
And this is something that I noticed too when I was wandering around the country.
And I see it still when I travel around that on the coasts and in DC, race is this big issue.
And we're always being told how divided we are and how much we hate each other and all this stuff.
And you get out of the coastal places and you get out of the cities, especially.
It's really not that big a thing, I find it.
It's not.
It's absolutely not.
Look, the high school I went to in the city of Pittsburgh was 70% black and 30% white.
And I never once thought of it that way.
Like I never once thought of that.
And I stayed very close in touch, even though it's almost 50 years with my classmates.
We're on a big text chain.
And I remember when like race became like this big thing and started to percolate up into everybody that's white is racist.
And my black friends would say, I never thought you were white.
I thought you were Italian.
Well, yeah.
And I thought that David Smolenski was Polish.
Right.
Like I never, I never saw you that way.
And I said, that's good because I never saw you that way.
And I think it's this manufactured thing to divide us because it draws attention and money and clicks to these news organizations because they benefit when we're divided.
Huge Movie Adaptation00:03:21
Yeah.
Well, I agree.
We're not.
We're like not.
So are you still talking to Trump fairly regularly?
Yeah.
And so the U.S. steel deal, that was huge.
Like that was a game changer.
Not just in Western Pennsylvania, Derry, Indiana, and a couple other places.
That has a trickle down impact on our entire community, like our entire country, our entire supply chain, our entire economy.
And so he came, I had the honor and privilege of riding in Air Force One when he came to Pittsburgh and made the announcement that the deal happened at a steel plant in West Mifflin.
And so I talked to him on the way there.
I talked to him on the way back.
I interviewed him for the story.
But also, he was just here a week ago for the AI energy, which is huge.
The fact this reinvigorates.
I have been chronicling for so long the decline.
It's so exciting the rebirth, the new industrial revolution.
Like you guys can't even understand how exciting this is.
This is a great moment in the middle of the country.
You know, it's so nuts because I've been reading the Wall Street Journal, which I'm going to stop reading because I just think they're writing about one little building in Manhattan where they're trading stocks, but they're not paying attention to everybody else.
I got to stop there, but really interesting to talk to you, Celine.
It always is.
And I appreciate it.
The book is called Butler, The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland.
Selena Zito.
Always, it's just interesting because I talk to a lot of reporters and they literally have no clue.
They have no clue what is going on outside of their little.
And they're making it into a movie.
Oh, are they?
I didn't know that.
Congratulations.
That's great.
Oh, that's really exciting.
Good for you.
I know.
Yeah.
I'm pretty excited about it.
Who optioned it?
Who's making it?
It's called Penza Productions.
They made a really fantastic movie last year with Matthew Modine, Hard Miles.
They only do real life stories.
And the book chronicles this teacher who takes these kids that are in a hard luck part of town and just like everyone thinks they're irredeemable.
And you'd be like, okay, y'all are getting on a bike and we're driving across the country.
It's an amazing, amazing movie.
Oh, that's great.
Congratulations, Selena.
That's terrific.
All right.
It's great seeing you.
Thank you for coming on.
I hope we get to talk again soon.
That'd be great.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks.
Well, that was a little dose of reality.
It's always just really nice to talk to her because she talks to people in the country, which I really don't feel happens at CNN.
I don't feel it happens at any of the networks.
I don't feel it happens at the big newspapers.
I think they really do not know what's going on and maybe they don't care.
Selena Zito, the book is Butler, soon to be a major motion picture, apparently, which is great.