BUTLER, Pa. — To hear it from attendees, speakers, vice presidential nominee JD Vance, the former president’s middle son, and even Donald Trump himself — it was nothing short of a miracle that Trump survived the attempt on his life at this very spot 84 days ago.
“I believe there was divine intervention that he didn’t end up dead after he got shot,” said Abigail Jones, a 43-year-old Trump supporter from Pittsburgh, one of the thousands who trekked to see Trump return to western Pennsylvania on Saturday. “And so if God saved his life that day, there must be a reason for it, because God uses people.”
Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and his handpicked chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the audience at the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds that God spared the former president’s life “not once, but twice,” alluding to the armed man arrested last month outside Trump’s Palm Beach golf club.
But Lara Trump took that idea to its darkest extreme when she framed the 2024 election as “no longer a fight between Republicans versus Democrats, left versus right. It’s good versus evil.”
Trump’s return to Butler, where a gunman grazed his ear with a bullet on July 13, was, throughout much of it, a chaotic split screen. The speakers mostly lauded Trump’s resilience, praised the physical and religious forces that protected him, and paid tribute, with a moment of silence and a live performance from a noted opera tenor, to the man killed that day, Corey Comperatore.
There were moments of quiet between the songs that fill the time between speakers — and a line an hour long for funnel cake. If you were far enough away from the stage, out in the grass, it was sometimes hard to hear what was happening on stage, far from the norm for a Trump rally.
But there was no shortage of the things that make a Trump rally a Trump rally: An Amazon warehouse’s worth of provocative shirts (“Missed Me,” with Trump flashing two middle fingers, was a popular one this weekend, as were references to pets) and nasty rhetoric from the speakers. There were no calls to take down the political temperature.
Vance, coming off a more subdued performance in this week’s vice presidential debate, suggested Democrats were to blame for inciting the Butler plot — even though law enforcement never uncovered a motive for the gunman or said he was working with Democrats.
“When that didn’t work, they tried to jail him. And with all the hatred they have spewed against him … it was only a matter of time before somebody tried to kill him,” Vance said. “I think you will all join me in saying to Kamala Harris, how dare you talk about threats to democracy. Donald Trump took a bullet for democracy.”
Trump, who was cocooned in bulletproof glass during his remarks, also blamed his opponents for orchestrating a campaign to destroy his life and the country. The GOP nominee said over the past eight years “those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and – who knows — maybe even tried to kill me.”
“We have an evil world,” Trump said, “We have a very sick world.”
Trump used his return to the fairgrounds to continue to pitch himself as a fighter for his most ardent supporters. “I will never bend. I will never break. I will never yield, not even in the face of death itself,” he said.
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Many of the people there on Saturday were at Trump’s rally back in July. The ones who spoke to HuffPost recalled an unusually calm scene once it became clear there was a gunman who had shot at Trump. For the most part, they felt safe returning to the fairgrounds three months later.
“I was right down here,” said Steve Nicklas, a retired school teacher, who pointed at a location several yards closer to the stage than where he was standing now. “The crowd was really calm. It was unbelievable. They told everybody to get down — people did. They said this event is over, and people [quickly] left. There was no stampede.”
Kathleen Marshall, a 43-year-old from Butler, was also there. “We knew what to do, but there were others there who were kind of in shock,” said Marshall, an active duty member of the military. Before Trump got up from the ground that day, “people had started to panic, you could feel the ripple through the crowd. [Then] he stood back up, and everybody stood up with him, and that calmed everybody down.”
Marshall said she wasn’t going to return to Butler to see Trump again, but changed her mind at the last minute. “We don’t run,” she said.
Jim Snyder, a retiree from Virginia and a member of the pro-gun Virginia Citizens Defense League — who was handing out stickers that said “guns save lives” — compared Trump’s return to the stump in Butler as a “Phoenix rising … you fall off the horse you get back up.”
Brandi Novosel, a 34-year-old health care worker from Butler said, “I’m proud of [Trump], because a lot of people wouldn’t have come back.”
Eric Trump, the husband of Lara Trump, described, in a pitched voice, his father pumping a fist in the air with “blood running down his face.”
“They tried to take away someone we all loved,” he said, also mentioning the death of Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter who died trying to shield his wife and daughters from the gunfire.
“I love all of you so much, I really mean it,” Eric Trump told the crowd, not long before his father took the stage. “This isn’t politics, guys.”