Twelve weeks after Thomas Crooks pulled the trigger on his rifle and 31 days before the election, Donald Trump returned to Butler this Saturday. As soon as he arrived on stage, he began speaking as if only seconds had passed since the bullet interrupted him on July 13. “As I told you…” Trump began, and the audience erupted in laughter and applause at his defiant attitude.
This was what the public wanted to see and what Trump was looking for: to exhume the cries of to fight, to fight, to fight which were accentuated at the Republican Convention and which were diluted after the resignation of Joe Biden from the candidacy and the emergence of Kamala Harris. “I think he will bring out the graphic again, because if he had not turned around to comment on it, the bullet would have hit him,” commented Codey Waterson two hours before the mogul’s appearance. Trump did not disappoint and when he stood up at the lectern, the same immigration graphic appeared on the screen behind him as on July 13th.
Like many participants in this Saturday’s rally, Codey returned to this field for the second time. More than two months have passed since then, but the feelings for this Butler County plumber remain the same. “At the time I had a mixture of worry and anger, but now I mostly feel anger and anger because of what happened. What I experienced here that day still seems surreal to me: the people screaming, the chaos, seeing Trump stand up with his face covered in blood,” he explained.
The event opened at 10 a.m. and many people like Codey were already inside by noon to get their seats. However, the best seats, at the foot of the stage or in the stands, had already been occupied for hours. Tens of thousands of people stood up or sat under a sun that still shone despite the month of October. “The last time I came, there were a lot of people, but this time… I would say more than double. “It’s a historic day,” he said. From where he was with his family, he couldn’t even get a good look at the scene, but he didn’t care. “The important thing is to be here.”
Trump went further than any other president or former president by exploiting the two assassination attempts of which he was the victim. When Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest in 1912, it reinforced the idea that he was nearly invincible as he sought re-election. Ronald Reagan also took advantage of the assassination attempt of which he was the victim in 1981, shortly after his accession to the presidency, to gain the sympathy of North American society during his mandate. Trump did it too, exploiting his photo ad nauseam, with his fist in the air and his face bloodied. But neither Roosevelt nor Reagan returned to celebrate any pilgrimage with their supporters.
Trump’s bloodied image of the MAGA world has been elevated to iconic status. An image screen-printed on t-shirts, red caps and badges with which street vendors tempted participants throughout the hour-long queue that one had to follow to enter. There were even miniature replicas of the semi-automatic rifle used by Crooks, painted red and printed with the letters MAGA. Of course, you couldn’t buy many souvenirs because security rules didn’t allow bags or backpacks inside the venue.
Posted on the roofs of the few barns and industrial warehouses that surrounded the meadow, snipers controlled the perimeter. “This time there is more security, I saw dogs detecting bombs and weapons, which was not the case last time,” said a satisfied Codey. Since the Butler shooting, the Secret Service has been in the spotlight and the agency’s director, Kimberly Cheatle, ended up resigning shortly after the events. Security was also reinforced around the former president, who today, as during his last open-air meetings, spoke behind armored glass screens.
In the first 18 minutes of his speech, Trump explained once again what the attack looked like that day. At the Republican Convention in Milwaukee, immediately after the shooting, Trump said he would only explain it once because it was too “painful” for him to remember. Butler was no exception, as in all of his rallies thus far, Trump has talked about what that day was like.
If the shooting served to give Trump his founding myth, the return to Butler served to institutionalize him. The references to God and the minute of silence for Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who died that day from a bullet, resonated with the mystique that increasingly takes hold of Trump in his speeches. And as happened in Milwaukee, Trump appealed to the unity of his people. But this time without nuance, directly naming the Democrats and the media as guilty.
“Those who want to stop us […] “They slandered me, they pursued me politically, they accused me, they tried to exclude me from the polls and, who knows, maybe they even tried to kill me,” said the Republican, who called his political rivals an “enemy within” and suggested they might have been behind his attack. After suffering the second attempted attack, Trump and his entourage further fueled these theories.
“I’m just saying it’s a big coincidence that the two people who tried to kill Trump appeared in videos from the BlackRock investment fund,” he commented before the start of the Roth Stump event. While it is true that Crooks appeared in a commercial video for the investment fund, the other man who attempted to assassinate Trump, Ryan Wesley Routh, never appeared in any BlackRock video. Even if the hoax spread on the networks. “In the electoral system, many illegal immigrants falsely register to vote. There are processes in which they do not ensure that the data is properly verified. This no longer gives good prospects for the conduct of the elections,” denounced Stump.
On the networks, numerous Trumpist profiles have given rise to hoaxes insinuating that undocumented immigrants are registering on the electoral lists. Elon Musk, owner of the platform This Saturday, when he took the stage as a star envoy, he once again put forward this idea and that the Democrats want to take away the right to vote from Americans. “California [que tienen un gobernador demócrata] They just passed a law that means you don’t need an ID card to vote,” he said.
“It is necessary for Trump to win to preserve democracy in the United States. If you don’t vote, it will be the last election. “That’s my prediction,” he blurted. Musk wasn’t the only speaker to call for “protecting the vote” in this election due to his appearance on stage this Saturday.
As is recurrent in the symbiosis between the two billionaires, Musk also once again congratulated the Republican for his “character”. “We have a president who can’t walk up a flight of stairs and another who raised his fist after being shot shouted: Fight, fight, fightwith blood running down his face,” the Tesla owner pointed out.
The billionaire’s appearance at this Saturday’s rally is the culmination of the alliance between the two tycoons, after Musk already interviewed Trump on X last September. Recently, Trump said that if he won these elections, he would appoint the South African as an advisor to his government to make “drastic reforms” in public spending.
