Former President Donald Trump returns to Butler, Penn., on Saturday for a rally on the site where he was nearly killed in a deadly July 13 shooting.
Speaking to NewsNation’s Ali Bradley this week, Trump said he felt he had to return to the Pennsylvania town.
“I’m going back to Butler because I feel I have an obligation to go back to Butler. We never finished what we were supposed to do. And I said that day when I was shot, I said, 'We’re coming back. We’re gonna come back.'”
The event will be on the grounds of the Butler Farm Show — the same location where the July assassination attempt took place. All signs point to a Trump rally that will be bigger and longer than even a standard Trump event. What’s unclear is how inflammatory of a tone Trump will take in front of a friendly crowd on a site where he narrowly escaped death, or whether he plans a more somber message.
When asked what Trump plans for his speech, campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt gave few details.
“President Trump looks forward to returning to Butler, Pennsylvania to honor the victims from that tragic day," she said in a statement. "The willingness of Pennsylvanians to join President Trump in his return to Butler represents the strength and resiliency of the American people.
Guests will include a shooting survivor, as well as Elon Musk
On Friday, the Trump campaign team sent out a list of more than 60 special guests for the event. It includes the family of Corey Comperatore, who died in the July 13 shooting, as well as David Dutch, who was injured in the shooting. (The other person injured that day, James Copenhaver, was not listed among the guests.)
The list also includes both typical Trump rally guests — an array of politicians, local sheriffs and Trump family members — as well as unusual additions. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will be in attendance, as well as the Frog-X Parachute Team, which bills itself as a “veteran-owned, extreme aerial demonstration team.”
All of this sets up the rally to be an all-day affair. Usually, doors have opened for recent Trump rallies three or four hours ahead of time. On Saturday, they will open at 10 a.m. ET — a full seven hours before Trump is set to speak, at 5 p.m. Three hours have been allotted before Trump’s speech for the pre-program.
The looming question is what all those people — and especially former President Trump — will have to say about the shooting, not to mention last month’s apparent assassination attempt in Florida.
In announcing the rally, the Trump campaign struck a positive tone: “President Trump will return to the site, joined by tens of thousands of proud citizens, and together, they will celebrate a unifying vision for America’s future in an event like the world has never seen before.”
But Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have not matched that tone when speaking about the shooting since then.
Trump and Vance have often blamed political opponents
When asked by NewsNation’s Bradley about his return to Butler, Trump’s immediate response was to cast blame on the White House for recent security difficulties.
“I think that the White House isn’t treating us very good,” he said. “I get crowds that are 10 times bigger than anybody else, 20 times bigger than anybody else. And we’re entitled to security. The White House makes it very difficult.”
A Wisconsin Trump rally was recently moved indoors due to a shortage of Secret Service officers, a fact that Trump has complained about in multiple recent appearances.
In the aftermath of the assassination attempt in Butler, the Secret Service has come under intense scrutiny for the security failures that allowed a gunman to fire multiple shots toward Trump in Butler, and then a second alleged gunman who was able to make it within several hundred yards of Trump at his West Palm Beach, Fla., golf course on Sept. 15.
The Secret Service has since increased security for Trump to a presidential level, and late last month Congress voted to boost funding for the agency by $231 million.
Meanwhile, Vance has blamed Trump’s political opponents for recent threats to the former president.
Vance at one point blamed an unnamed “they” for the Butler assassination attempt.
“They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him,” he said at an August rally in Atlanta. “They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.”
In an August appearance on the Full Send Podcast, Vance also expressed anger — and suggested a partisan conspiracy — because of his perception that the assassination attempt hadn’t received sustained-enough attention.
“The people, the senior leadership, the people who run the search algorithms, it is effectively a left wing propaganda machine,” he said of Google, which he alleged was making it harder to search for content about the Butler assassination attempt.
The Butler shooting took place just two days before the Republican National Convention opened in Milwaukee, and it lent the gathering an ecstatic tone, as attendees celebrated Trump’s survival. For a brief period, it seemed that the event could reshape the race.
But the shooting proved not to have lasting effects — especially because just over a week later, President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, eventually handing the torch to Vice President Harris. The race has been essentially deadlocked ever since.
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