Donald Trump returns to scene of Butler rally shooting

Butler County in western Pennsylvania is rock-solid Trump country.

In yards, on roadsides and at gas stations, the messages on billboards are direct.

“Bulletproof” is one, on a photo of the former president with his fist raised, moments after being shot in the same city.

Another, more overtly political, said: “Even my dog ​​hates Biden. »

The former president received twice as many votes here as Joe Biden in 2020, beating Hillary Clinton in 2016 by a similar margin. In fact, this county has only voted Democratic once in the last 150 years of presidential elections.

Butler has always prided itself on being known as the home of America’s Jeep, but this year it’s best remembered for one thing: where a former Republican president was about to be assassinated.

A bullet grazed his ear that day, July 13, and Butler is going through his own healing process as Donald Trump returns to the same spot, on the Farm Show grounds, for a rally Saturday night .

Trump’s speech is expected to begin around 5:00 p.m. local time (9:00 p.m. GMT), with the venue apparently already locked down ahead of his visit.

For the first time since he publicly supported the former president, Elon Musk – the boss of X, Tesla and SpaceX – confirmed his presence in the audience.

Before Trump returned to Butler, the BBC spoke to some people who were just feet away from him when the shots rang out in July.

There is sadness and guilt among local Republicans, as well as resentment that their county — so staunchly pro-Trump — is the place where this happened.

“It was the saddest moment of my life,” said Jim Hulings, chairman of the Butler County Republican Party, who was 30 feet away at the time and thought Trump had been killed. “I was horrified that someone had the audacity to shoot a great man.”

Jondavid Longo, the mayor of Slippery Rock, a small town a few miles away, was on stage moments before the shoot, as part of the warm-up.

When the shooter started shooting, he instinctively used his body to cover his pregnant wife. He says he relives the incident in his head every day.

“It’s a difficult thing for us to accept,” he said. We feel guilty that someone else lost their life that day, he said, and that two other people were seriously injured.

It was Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former volunteer firefighter, who died after throwing himself under bullets to protect his wife and daughters.

His widow Helen seems lost and distracted when I meet her. It’s clear she’s struggling.

“I think about it every day. I see it every time I close my eyes.”

She and Corey were childhood sweethearts, married for 29 years. And both are staunch Trump supporters.

They joked that day that the former president was going to invite Corey on stage, she said. Days later, his fire chief’s jacket was brought to the Republican convention in Milwaukee and placed on stage as Trump delivered his nomination acceptance speech.

“I just cried because, you know, I said he had his moment on stage with Trump.”

Like Helen, Trump supporters in Butler have dozens of questions about how this could have happened.

While the motivations of 20-year-old shooter Thomas Crooks remain unclear, what has become much clearer is the series of safety errors that led him to pull the trigger.

Two hours before opening fire, he was able to fly a drone around the site without being detected because the Secret Service’s counter-surveillance equipment was not working.

Communication failures meant that Crooks’ suspicious sightings an hour and a half before he shot Trump were not relayed to all elements of the Secret Service.

More than half an hour before the shooting, he was seen by police using a rangefinder pointed at the scene, a device often used by hunters pursuing their prey.

However, a little more than 25 minutes later, Crooks had managed to climb onto the roof of a local business and fired eight shots. Seconds later, he was dead, shot in the head by a Secret Service sniper.

Those few seconds still haunt many of those who witnessed it.

Lucie Roth can be seen in the VIP seats behind Trump in one of the most recognizable photos of the shooting, taken by a Reuters photographer.

She initially thought the gunshots were fireworks, but then she heard screams yelling at her to “Get down!” » and fell to the ground.

“I really thought he was dead. I saw the Secret Service piling on him like he was the quarterback in a football game.”

She was still on the ground when she heard the crowd roar and applaud, and then knew he was okay.

Renae Billow and her 11-year-old son and Trump impersonator Gino Benford were just feet away from Lucie and Gino is clearly visible in the Reuters photo, wearing a blonde wig and dark suit.

Speaking from his family’s home in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Gino said he was both scared and calm, “half and half,” when the shots rang out.

“I asked myself: Who would want to do that to such a great president?”

That evening, just outside the gathering, we began interviewing people as they were leaving.

But one man stood out. He wore a Trump hat with fake orange hair sticking out of it and held a beer can.

Greg Smith’s words, in which he described how he saw the shooter on the roof and tried to warn the secret services, resonated around the world.

This provided the first clue to the catastrophic security failure and a clip of the interview was viewed by tens of millions of people on social media.

Finding him this week in his store, a few meters from the scene of the shooting, he still feels angry.

“I was very frustrated when I talked to you, extremely frustrated because I think about the time frame. He was on that roof for minutes, crawling, and we were pointing at him and yelling.”

“I remember thinking, ‘Why? Why isn’t anyone doing something? How is this happening? How can I still hear President Trump talking while this is happening?'”

There is also pride in what he did in speaking out. People tell him that he is part of history, that he is the first to tell the world what happened.

As someone who usually shuns the limelight, he added, “I jumped out of my comfort zone and did this. And I’m happy that it happened like that, that all this what I told you that evening turned out to be true.”

Greg, who that day was listening to Trump from outside the rally, has no plans to attend Saturday’s event. He says his 12-year-old son was traumatized and would jump whenever he heard fireworks.

Although they are still angry about the security breaches, Helen Comperatore and her daughters will return.

That’s what Corey would have wanted, she said.

“I’ve tried to do that with everything I do, what would he want me to do? What would Corey do? And that’s how I do it.”