Donald Trump returned to the Butler, Pennsylvania venue where he survived an assassination attempt three months ago — but the 2024 race has dramatically changed since then.
July 13 — the day that a lone gunman opened fire at the Butler rally, killing one, and injuring others, including the former president — marked a pivotal moment in the highly contested race.
Since then, President Joe Biden dropped out, a heavily scrutinized Secret Service identified its failures and underwent sweeping changes, Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate, enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris grew and Trump lost his lead in the polls, and yet another alleged attempt on Trump’s life unfolded on September 15 at his Florida golf course.
The image of Trump triumphantly pumping his fist in the air with blood dripping across his face seems to have faded amid the race’s many fluctuations.
At Saturday’s rally, the GOP nominee made sure to remind voters of that moment.
“When I got up I asked whether or not anybody was killed,” he said. “I assumed that there would be a lot because I heard the bullets winging right over my head.”
He explained to NewsNation earlier this week why he felt compelled to return.
“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,” he said. “I said that day, when I was shot, I said: ‘We’re coming back. We’re going to come back.’ And I’m fulfilling a promise. I’m fulfilling, really, an obligation.”
While the campaign told CNN that this rally will be “different,” the former president himself earlier this week vowed that the campaign event will pick up right where it left off a few months ago: “I think I’ll start the speech by saying, ‘As I was saying.’”
The ear bandage has come off, he has been named the Republican nominee, and he faces a new formidable rival, yet in the three months since the former president has sustained not one but two attempts on his life, shockingly, nothing about him seems to have fundamentally changed.
Trump took a moment at the rally to recognize the victims of the shooting, but Trump quickly moved on, and the rally resembled a typical campaign event stuffed with false and inflated claims and attacks against his rivals.
Security enhancements
Trump predicted the Butler venue will be the “safest place on Earth.” Perhaps that’s because security was improved this time around.
The Secret Service came under intense scrutiny for failuring to secure the venue where a 20-year-old armed with an AR-15 opened fire from a nearby rooftop. Congressional hearings and a Senate committee report revealed the agenc’s numerous shortcomings.
The agency’s “failures in planning, communications, security, and allocations of resources … were foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting in the assassination attempt,” according to a report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Secret Service has said it has increased its security presence around Trump so he has the “highest level of security” that the agency provides.
To address communication issues, Secret Service worked out of a “unified command post” with state, local and federal partners, a source in law enforcement familiar with the plan told The Independent . There was “a large coordinated presence of law enforcement,” the source added.
Kimberly Cheatle, the head of the agency at the time of the attack, had previously acknowledged that the roof where Thomas Matthew Crooks fired his AR-15-style rifle was considered a security vulnerability. The agency experienced “technical difficulties” with its drone system on that doomed day and failed to detect Crooks’ drone, which had flown over the site for 11 minutes before he opened fire. Cheatle resigned in the wake of the attack.
On Saturday, law enforcement officers planned to ensure the roof was secured, CNN reported. The agencies “secured some of the sight lines” and had trailers surrounding the perimeter and drones at the site, the source said.
Trump was surrounded by bulletproof protective glass, as he has been during his recent rallies.
Relatives of Corey Comperatore, the former fire chief who was killed in the attack, as well as a supporter who was injured, also attended Saturday’s rally.
A new rival
Trump hadn’t announced a running mate and was still campaigning against Biden on July 13.
But the playing field has changed significantly since then.
Since entering the race, the vice president’s popularity has surged. Donations, coconut emojis, and an uptick in voter registrations have flooded in.
Harris fared well against Trump in her first, and likely only, debate against him, after which she raked in numerous coveted endorsements, including Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen.
Despite having won the state in 2020, Biden trailed Trump in Pennsylvania at the time — and that margin only grew in favor of the former president after the assassination attempt, polling averages show.
This time around, Trump is up against Harris, who is neck-and-neck with him in the swing state, recent polls show. FiveThirtyEight polling averages have the vice president leading the former president by a 0.6 percent margin — an essential deadlock. A September poll by Franklin and Marshall showed the vice president slightly leading Pennsylvania, with 49 percent compared to Trump’s 46 percent.
Other data points toward a pro-Harris trend in the state. In the week that Biden dropped out, new voter registrations in Pennsylvania increased by 262 percent among Black women under 30 compared to the same week in 2020 — a demographic group that leans heavily toward Harris.
Nearly two months to the day after the July attack, Trump faced another alarming incident when a 58-year-old man allegedly camped outside the former president’s West Palm Beach golf course with a high-powered SKS-style assault rifle, waiting for the former president to pass by.
Trump and Vance have blamed Democrats for pushing “rhetoric” that allegedly fueled the September 15 incident. Last month, Trump told Fox News that “their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
Meanwhile, Vance argued that since there have been no attempts against Harris’ life and two against Trump, “that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out. Somebody’s going to get hurt by it.”
For her part, Harris swiftly condemned the latest incident. saying she was “deeply disturbed” and emphasized that she condemns political violence. “We all must do our part to ensure that this incident does not lead to more to violence,” she sad.
Trump himself
The political landscape may have shifted drastically since July 13, but Trump appears to remain largely the same.
Recent rallies suggest his rhetoric might even be turning more volatile.
Ever since his legal woes started stacking up after the 2020 election, Trump has labeled criminal indictments and lawsuits as politically motivated, blaming Democratic opponents and the so-called “Department of Injustice.” He has vowed to prosecute his political rivals, if elected.
On Saturday, Trump, rather taking the opportunity to turn down the political temperature, instead took his scapegoating one step further, suggesting that his political opponents “maybe tried to kill me.”
“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,” Trump told the Butler crowd. “But I never stopped fighting for you, and I never will.”
His allies also don’t seem to be turning down the temperature, using Trump’s words as inspiration. On Saturday, Trump’s son Eric Trump and world’s wealthiest man Elon Musk both led the crowd to chant “fight, fight, fight!”
Some supporters were holding up signs with those same words, which Trump uttered as he pumped his fist with blood smattered across his face after the shooting.
Trump also repeated his familiar false claims about voter fraud claims and misinformation about migrants, and he suggested that he would once again contest the election results, if he loses. “Stop the steal. Because we have a lot of votes, we have plenty of votes,” he said on Saturday.
Even after two assassination attempts, Trump has never neglected his branding. He has sold Trump-branded steaks, sneakers, Bibles, digital trading cards, and even merchandise featuring his own mugshot. Now, he is even capitalizing from the harrowing incident, selling T-shirts with his triumphant fist in the air.
Trump kicked off Saturday’s rally by quipping “as I was saying,” suggesting he was picking up exactly where he left off three months ago.