What I Saw in Butler, Pennsylvania

On October 5, 2024, Donald Trump returned to the Butler Farm Show grounds where he had avoided death by a hair’s breadth on July 13. He was not the only one to return.  From my position on the left side of the field, close to the infamous roof, I talked to several attendees who had also been present on July 13.

One man told me that he was standing more or less where he was that day when the shots rang out. He had returned to show his support.

Another couple, Roger and Linda, drove all the way from West Virginia to attend the rally and showed me on an aerial map where they had been standing when the shots rang out. They recounted that it had not been immediately clear what was happening and many people had reed standing until a state trooper near them began to yell for everyone to get down. 

Nearly everyone I chatted with stated in some form or another that they were here to show support for Trump and had already made their minds up to vote for him long ago. As one man who had driven about an hour to be there put it, he was there to show support in the face of the attacks Trump endures everyday. 

Another man I talked to, who it serendipitously turned out had been an acquaintance nine years ago when I had worked in the DC area, had driven five hours from Northern Virginia to be here, echoed an experience nearly identical to my own. He had been a ho-hum Trump supporter who was planning to vote for him, but was not enthusiastic until the fateful and tragic events of July 13 transformed his understanding of the election and turned him into a passionate supporter. 

Numerous local officials and members of the campaign spoke in the four hours leading up to Trump’s appearance around 6pm, with nearly everyone emphasizing Corey Comperatore’s life and his heroic act of shielding his family amidst the oncoming fire. When Christopher Macchio sang “Ave Maria” as a tribute to Comperatore many people were openly moved to tears. 

This was my first time attending a Trump rally, or any political rally since I had attended one of Ron Paul’s in Pittsburgh in 2012. Standing around for seven hours left me plenty of time to reflect on how I ended up here—not just at the rally, but also “here” in the sense of cheering unabashedly for Trump. My 23-year-old self from 2016 would have been quite surprised to see me now.

The events of July 13 played a large role. It is difficult to imagine what would have happened to the country in the event Trump had been killed, but there was more to it than just Trump’s brush with death. The shooting happened a 40-minute drive from my house. A fellow Westsylvanian was killed, and two others, one of whom lives in the township next to mine, were seriously injured. The shooter lived about a 20-minute drive away from my house. To say this struck close to home is an understatement. 

For myself and many others, the assassination attempt, and Trump’s defiant, raised fist and call to “fight, fight, fight!”  represented a cosmological shift in our understanding of the presidential race. 

But what exactly was he exhorting people to fight, and why did it resonate so deeply with me so as to turn me from a ho-hum unenthusiastic supporter to cheering him on without reservations?

As a naive, “principled nonvoter” libertarian, I did not vote in the 2016 election. But by the time voting day rolled around, I found myself rooting for Trump because of the outpouring of vitriol against Trump supporters, who were portrayed as worse than Nazis. Since nearly my entire extended family supported Trump, I took this personally. 

It did not matter to many people on social media that the same Pennsylvanian voters who had propelled Trump to victory had previously been solid Democratic voters. It did not matter that there were economic and socio-cultural grievances that had motivated this support for Trump. All that seemed to matter to the voices of rage online was that evil white people had helped to install a barbarian into the White House. 

Aside from taking pleasure in the shock and horror of the people calling my friends, neighbors, and family fascist white supremacists, I still was highly critical of Trump in the years to come. Yet in the wake of Trump’s bout with Covid and the obscene death wishes to be seen all over social media, I finally began to understand that the danger of such hatred was not limited to Trump alone, but to those who support him, or even just fit the stereotype of supporting him. It was at this point I concluded that Trump’s opponents were a threat to my family and neighbors and that I would be voting for Trump. Nevertheless, while I was rooting for him, I was not particularly enthusiastic, especially in the 2024 campaign season. 

I had complaints and quibbles about various policies and plans. I worried who would staff his administration after the disastrous picks the first time. I was worried about his capricious streak. 

But Trump’s defiant fist transformed the election from a question of tax rates and foreign policy minutia to a symbolic clash between incompatible spiritual visions of the nation itself. Before Trump came on stage, Steve Witkoff stated that this election went beyond mere politics to the very soul of the country. The truth of that statement is especially relevant in Western Pennsylvania, not only as an important region in a state that is likely to be the keystone to the election, but as a place that encapsulates the very heart and soul of America.

Seventy-five miles from where Trump was standing in Butler is the Fort Necessity National Battlefield in Fayette County. This is where George Washington ignited the French and Indian War as a result of a land dispute with the French garrison at Fort Duquesne, built at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in what is now the heart of downtown Pittsburgh. 

Even back then it was clear that geography had destined Western Pennsylvania for greatness. With abundant coal and other natural resources paired with the numerous waterways that eventually flowed into the Mississippi River the region experienced extreme growth for over a century, helping to propel Pennsylvania to a peak of 38 electoral votes in the 1912 to 1928 elections, second only to New York’s 45. 

Lewis and Clark launched their famous expedition from the renamed Fort Lafayette. The first ever oil well was drilled in Western Pennsylvania (near aptly named Oil City). Titans of business and industry like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Heinz, Andrew Mellon, George Westinghouse and Henry Clay Frick transformed the world with the empires they built here. 

The steel mills of the Pittsburgh area produced more steel during the Second World War than all the Axis powers combined. The Jeep was created in Butler County. Two Pittsburgh companies, American Bridge and the Dravo Corporation, employed tens of thousands of people in their Ohio River shipyards, including my late grand-aunt, to produce a fifth of all the massive LSTs used in amphibious landings from Normandy to Saipan.

Western Pennsylvania has been the home of my ancestors since my sixth great-grandfather, Paul Trimmer (also Richard Nixon’s third great-grandfather), died in Washington County in 1838. When my great-great grandfather, Joseph Yost, immigrated to America in 1892, he made his home in Pittsburgh and raised his 11 children five miles from where I live today. 

It is precisely this deep and rich history that is ultimately responsible for the untrammeled rage its inhabitants stir in the minds of the left. A people rooted in the history of specific time and place are more difficult to treat as simple economic cogs that can be swapped out at will for immigrants from the rest of the planet. A people rooted in history similarly puts the lie to claim that foreigners can in fact be even more American than people whose ancestors have lived here for centuries, merely because they have adopted the supposedly universal values of our constitutional system, as if America exists as an abstract exercise in thought. 

The disdain with which the establishment holds Western Pennsylvanians was barely hidden in the past, going back to Barack Obama’s remarks in 2008 at a San Francisco fundraiser about people in “small towns in Pennsylvania” who are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion”. But in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory the mask has long since slipped after it became apparent that the people stuck in history were not planning to go quietly into that good night.

In addition to the unceasing vitriol about Trump supporters being Nazis, more serious proposals popped up, in places like the New York Times, where in October of 2020 Peter Beinart questioned if the U.S. might need international intervention to deal with Trump and his odious supporters. Similarly, MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted out “The most humane and reasonable way to deal with all these people, if we survive this, is some kind of truth and reconciliation commission”—“these people” being Trump supporters, who, in other words, need to be “dealt with” like Rwandan war criminals.

“In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.” Trump’s words in response to his federal indictment last year ring ever truer the more one pays attention to leftist rhetoric and the open disdain with which they hold Trump supporters, even when they are not openly celebrating political violence against them. 

When Elon Musk spoke at the rally, he stated that this may be the last truly democratic election in the U.S., due to the left importing millions of illegal immigrants into swing states. He later stated in an interview with Tucker Carlson that, if Trump were defeated, he would doubtlessly be targeted by the government even more than he already has been. Tucker remarked that Musk would be “f*cked”. 

So would Westsylvania. But at least someone is fighting for us.