Trump returns to the same town he was shot in as mythology grows with his base
If history is any indication, surviving an assassination attempt doesn't actually offer much political benefit, but that isn't stopping former President Donald Trump from leaning hard on his near-death experience in the home stretch of his third White House bid.
Trump returns to Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday to hold a rally in the swing-state community where he was shot in the ear by gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was quickly killed by a Secret Service counter sniper.
The rally is intended to be a triumphant moment for the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, symbolizing his perseverance and his fighting spirit. Former President Theodore Roosevelt tried something similar when he was shot during a trip to Milwaukee on Oct. 14, 1912, at the height of his third-party campaign to regain the presidency.
Roosevelt insisted on delivering his speech that night, despite a bloodied shirt and what biographer Edmund Morris called a "dime-sized hole, bleeding slowly, about an inch below and to the right of his right nipple." He lost the race anyway.
No candidate has made surviving an assassination attempt a campaign issue to the extent Trump has.
More: As Donald Trump returns to Butler, Pa., there’s one name he never mentions: Thomas Crooks
Four days after being shot, Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and declared he had a story to tell, and only would tell it once because it was so traumatic.
Trump hasn’t stopped talking about the shooting, though.
A USA TODAY analysis found that Trump held at least 51 public events since the shooting and mentioned it at 31 of them.
Once deemed too painful to discuss, the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler has become a central aspect of his campaign and part of the growing lore around him, mythologized and celebrated by the MAGA faithful.
Shooting imagery – most notably the picture of Trump pumping his fist on stage moments after being shot, blood smeared across his face – has become part of the MAGA movement’s iconography, reproduced on everything from shirts to flags and Christmas ornaments.
Trump's return to Butler will cement the narrative he tells about the shooting, its role in his campaign and its significance to his supporters.
“President Trump looks forward to returning to Butler, Pennsylvania to honor the victims from that tragic day,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told USA TODAY. “The willingness of Pennsylvanians to join President Trump in his return to Butler represents the strength and resiliency of the American people.”
Trump’s Butler story is about heroes and courage under fire, where the actual villain who shot him is ignored and replaced with political opponents, despite no public evidence that Democratic rhetoric motivated the shooter.
Trump has blamed Democrats for the two assassination plots against him, adding to what he claims is a historic level of persecution that extends to the legal cases against him, his two impeachments and a special counsel investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties with Russia.
Shooting alters campaign, but not for long
Crooks opened fire on Trump on Saturday, July 13, just two days before the Republican National Convention was set to begin in the largest city of the 2024 swing state of Wisconsin.
Trump already was looking strong heading into the convention after President Joe Biden’s debate performance a few weeks earlier.
Polls showed Trump ahead of Biden in the key swing states, and there were growing calls for the incumbent 81-year old Democratic president to drop out of the race.
Surviving an assassination attempt rallied support around Trump and gave his campaign a feeling of inevitability. Among the MAGA base, Trump was elevated to near martyr status. Many people in the convention crowd wore white ear bandages in solidarity with Trump, who gave his nomination acceptance speech with a bandaged ear.
Yet, within a few days, everything had changed.
Biden dropped out of the race on July 21 and Vice President Kamala Harris quickly secured the Democratic nomination. She has been running much stronger than Biden, and polls indicate the race is now essentially a toss up.
That Trump hasn't politically benefited much from his brush with death is in line with historical precedent.
John A. Tures, a professor of political science at LaGrange College in Georgia who has written about Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who also was shot while running for president in 1972 and survived, said it's a "myth" to think that surviving an assassination attempt helps candidates politically. He pointed out that Wallace won more states in the Democratic primaries before the shooting - four - than afterward (three).
"There’s no evidence of anything more than a slight blip in the polls after any assassination attempt," Tures said.
"I don't see it turning the election any direction"
Like Trump, Roosevelt incorporated his shooting into his campaign. It didn't help.
Running as the nominee of the Progressive Party, Roosevelt invoked the group's nickname in his post-shooting speech by saying "it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."
Roosevelt, who left the Republican Party to run against former ally and President William Howard Taft, wound up splitting the Republican vote and clearing the way for victory by Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Wallace's shooting on May 17, 1972, left the then-segregationist in a wheelchair and effectively ended his already longshot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Three presidents eligible for re-election have also survived assassination attempts in the past 75 years, but there were no signs that their political fortunes were affected.
On Nov. 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists attacked Blair House, where President Harry Truman was staying while the White House underwent renovation. One was killed and the other captured before they could get to the president.
At the time, historians said, there was some talk that the attack might help Truman revive his sagging political fortunes. It did not, and the incumbent Democratic president didn't even run for re-election in 1952.
As with other survivors of attempted assassinations, "it didn't change in any fundamental way his political trajectory," said historian Matthew Dallek, who is working on a book about failed presidential assassination attempts and political violence in the 20th century.
Two decades later, Gerald Ford became the first sitting president to survive two assassination attempts, both in September of 1975.
Months later, Ford faced a tough Republican primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. Ford held off Reagan but wound up losing the general election to former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.
Reagan is the last sitting president to survive an assassination attempt, shot after giving a speech at the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981.
That shooting did appear to help Reagan, at least in the short term. His bonhomie after being shot - “I hope you are all Republicans," he cracked to surgeons - boosted his standing with the public and likely helped him push Congress to pass a major economic package featuring tax cuts.
But the public goodwill felt toward Reagan didn't help his party, which suffered a massive defeat in the 1982 congressional elections, amid a raging recession. Two years later, a booming economy fueled Reagan's landslide re-election.
Other factors are likely to decide this year's election as well.
"Elections are about the fundamentals," said David Head, a historian at the University of Central Florida who has studied assassination attempts.
As for the Trump assassination attempts, Head said: "I don't see it turning the election any direction, one way or the other."
Trump's campaign narrative
Trump has incorporated the attempt on his life into a broader campaign narrative. Returning to Butler could help him drive home that message.
"I could be having a nice life right now. Nobody would be shooting at me,” Trump said at an Oct. 1 event in Wisconsin.
In Michigan, a few days earlier, Trump said the only presidents who have “shots fired at them” are “consequential” ones. “I’ve got a lot of enemies,” he added.
Running for president is a “tough life” Trump said in early September at a Wisconsin rally, adding: “It’s not the easiest. You get shot at.”
Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton, now a regular critic of his one-time boss, said the former president’s response to the Butler shooting is “vintage Trump.”
“The thing that he likes to talk about most is Trump,” Bolton said, adding: “He wants to try to appear as a heroic figure, and he may to some people, in this case he’s not making it up.”
Obsessed with strength
Barbara Res worked for Trump in the 1980s and 1990s as executive vice president of the Trump Organization and said he wanted people to think he is “all powerful.”
His narrative around the shooting is designed to highlight his strength, Res said, while also playing up his constant refrain that a vast array of forces are out to get him.
“Whatever he had to gain was sympathy, strength, how great he handled it," Res said. "Look at the world: They’re after Trump."
Bolton said Trump benefits more politically from casting the attack as part of a larger plot to get him, rather than focusing on a specific individual.
Trump often tells his supporters that his adversaries are coming to get them, and they’re only going after him because he’s standing in the way. He is tying the Butler shooting into the “vast ‘they’ that are after him,” Bolton said.
“It’s worked for Trump… always being the victim,” Bolton said, adding: “It worked at least once to make him president, and may work again.”
Trump never mentioned Crooks in his 51 public appearances since the shooting that USA TODAY analyzed.
Crooks, 20, remains an enigma. FBI Director Christopher Wray described Trump's would-be assassin as a “loner” who had little interaction “face to face or digitally with a lot of people.” He liked video games and was a “fairly avid shooting hobbyist,” Wray said. Crooks was a registered Republican who donated $15 to a liberal cause.
Instead of focusing on Crooks, Trump has pointed to Democratic rhetoric.
“I took the bullet for democracy,” Trump said in West Palm Beach on July 26, adding: “I might have taken it because of their rhetoric,” referring to Democrats.
Trump supporters rally around him
Many of Trump's supporters believe the shooting is part of a persecution pattern against Trump. Returning to Butler could be a seminal moment for them.
Prominent supporters such as Lee Greenwood, whose song “God Bless the USA” opens every Trump rally, and Elon Musk will be in attendance.
Musk endorsed Trump on the day of the shooting, sharing a video showing Trump standing up after being hit, pumping his fist, and yelling “fight, fight, fight.”
That image and those words have become iconic. The Republican National Convention crowd this summer even broke into chants of “fight, fight, fight."
“I believe it’s inspiring to the American people to have a candidate who literally was shot and immediately stands up and says: ‘fight, fight, fight,” said Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla. “It’s patriotic. It’s the type of leadership you want.”
(This story has been updated with a link to a live video feed.)
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump leans into assassination attempt stories on campaign trail