Book Review: Butler

First, a little background on the book's author, Salena Zito. She's a journalist and author. She's been interviewing the great and the good for decades. But above all, she's a mother, and a grandmother. One who is proudly and firmly planted in Western Pennsylvania, and has been so for generations.

All those things are front and center in her new book, Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland.

I don't want you to be disappointed if you purchase this book on the strength of this review: It's not a forensic examination of the assassination attempt. It's not a strident call for more transparency on the part of the Secret Service, the FBI, or the Department of Justice.

It's a very personal account from a woman who was there on the day, a few feet from Trump when he was shot, and who had a great deal of interaction and follow-up with him afterwards.

Salena Zito isn't your typical perfectly coiffed twenty-first-century, DC-insider news anchor. She's 65 years old. She's sometimes a bit dishevelled. She's not blonde. She's known for her "red, white and blue" stars-and-stripes cowboy boots and her wild hair. Never more so (at least when it comes to the boots--I daresay the hair was pretty impressive in the moment, as well) than here, in an image which appears on this site:

Salena, Trump calls her--much to her embarrassment--"My Sa-LEE-na"--and her family had just been taken to the ground by Trump staffer Michel Picard in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. She and they were in the "buffer zone," along with photographers Evan Vucci, Anna Moneymaker and Doug Mills, whose iconic photographs document the event forever. She was mere feet away from Trump, and she heard and saw it all.

That unique recounting of the event and its aftermath is the first of the things (in my humble opinion) which make this book so important.

The second is the integrity with which she reports the event, from the perspective of a "local," and how she weaves this story into her contention that journalism as we used to know it is dead. Gone are the days when a determined journo would start at--let's say--the Claysville Recorder, move on to the Washington (PA) Observer Reporter, then to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and on to, perhaps, the New York Times or the Washington Post, carrying with him forever a wealth of experience and knowledge of the parts of the country that Zito calls "The Middle of Somewhere."

That place where most of us live.

No. Today, they graduate from their Ivy League schools, and they immediately catapult to the top of the heap, whether it be New York, Washington, DC, or Los Angeles, taking all their prejudice and privilege, absent any knowledge of the struggles of real people, along with them.

These days, I believe Zito is saying, the invaluable "local" reportage, what she calls "shoe leather journalism" (I did spot the hole in the sole of her cowboy boot), is more likely to come from the new and alternative media, from places where such strictures don't apply, and where anyone with an internet connection and a USB microphone can say his piece. Her appearance this morning on the Ruthless podcast (Zito's portion on the show begins at 39:25) speaks to as much.

The third thing that Zito does, in Chapter 9 of this book, is deconstruct what went wrong with the Harris campaign in a way I haven't seen done before. It's devastating. Zito takes advantage of the fact that Harris seemed determined to win Pennsylvania, and that she almost lived in Pennsylvania for weeks in the closing months of the campaign, largely to no good effect. This is at the same time Trump was doing his very effective McDonald's schtick. Zito, who was there for almost all of it, explains why Harris failed in terms that resonate with me. I do hope no candidate with ideas about running for the Democrat nomination in 2028 pays attention to this chapter.

The day after the assassination attempt, Donald Trump phoned Salena Zito seven or eight times. Her retelling of the first conversation is hilarious:

"Good morning, Salena! It's Donald Trump. I wanted to see if you and your daughter Shannon, and Michael are okay. And I wanted to apologize that we weren't able to do the interview [after the event]."

I wasn't quite sure how to respond to that. I had known that he was okay from the chatter in the holding area after the shooting, but I wasn't expecting a call from him. So I did something I rarely do in a casual conversation, let alone when talking to a former president. I cussed like a truck driver.

"All due respect, Mr. President, but are you [effing] kidding me? You've just been shot..."

She's been shy about revealing much detail about those conversations. But she's said that she thinks Trump was processing the event, that he needed to talk about it with someone who'd been there, and that she didn't try to get a story from him; she tried to give him the space to work things out for himself, something she thought he needed to do.

This is a charming book. If you approach it from that standpoint, I don't think you'll be disappointed. And I'm not sure I want to know you if you are.

Congrats, Salena Zito, on making it to #1 on the NYT Best Seller list in your first week of publication.

How the other side must be fuming.