The most unsettling detail you notice when visiting the Butler Fairgrounds—where a 20-year-old sniper almost killed President Donald Trump from a rooftop only a hundred yards away—is how close he was able to get with a ladder and a gun.
Previously known as the birthplace of the Jeep, the community of Butler, Pa., gained notoriety as the place where Thomas Crooks came within an inch of killing a President. More than a year later, locals are still angry and suspicious, rejecting Washington’s explanation of what really happened that fateful day.
“The whole thing just doesn’t make sense. They’re hiding something,” a Butler resident told me. “You don’t get that close to a President with a rifle unless someone lets you.”
Eyewitnesses insist people in the crowd pointed out the gunman to law enforcement long before the shots rang out. “They did nothing,” another resident told me, shaking his head. “Then they say, ‘Oh, the roof was too steep to have anyone up there.’ That’s nonsense. We’ve all seen it—it’s flat enough to walk on.”
A member of the Butler Fairgrounds board agreed. He described the security operation as “a mess from word one.” After meeting with federal agents weeks before the rally, he told his wife something felt off. “I said to her, ‘They really don’t know what they’re doing. I think something bad is going to happen.’”
The failure of the Secret Service and federal law enforcement under the Biden administration was not an isolated act of neglect, residents believe, but the culmination of years of political persecution. “They were negligent to the point of being complicit,” one called it, quick to point out that the shooting resulted from the failure of the feds, not local law enforcement.
The locals connect the dots the way many Trump supporters have done. “They framed him with Russia Gate, impeached him twice, dragged him into court on ridiculous charges, went after his family and associates, and tried to keep him off the ballot,” said another resident I interviewed. “It seems like they would stop at nothing to keep him from being President.”
An hour’s drive south to Bethel Park—the shooter’s quiet suburb outside Pittsburgh—feels worlds away. Most residents declined to talk, weary from the media glare. But a few did, carefully. “The family was quiet, kept to themselves; we didn’t see much of them,” said one neighbor. “Nothing about them seemed out of the ordinary.”
The consensus: the ideology that drove the assailant didn’t come from this tidy neighborhood of modest homes but from the dark corners of the internet that prey on disaffected youth. “I don’t know where it’s coming from—the dark web, chat rooms—but it did reach this young man and drove him to try and kill the President.”
At the Lernerville Speedway, where volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore once worked as part of the safety crew, people spoke with emotion and pride. “Corey represented the best of us,” said a track spokeswoman who knew him. “He died shielding his family from bullets meant for the President. He’s a hero.” The Speedway held a memorial night in his honor, and he will forever be remembered through a bronze statue in front of the Butler Fire Department.
The community’s hospitality to the South Shore Press was as heartfelt as their grief. “Tell people Corey was a man of faith,” one said quietly. “He didn’t die for politics—he died doing what was right.”
Driving the rolling farm roads between Butler and Pittsburgh, the contrast in outlook is stark. The rural counties are deep red, Trump signs here and there; the suburbs Democrat blue, disturbed by his return to the White House. “If the shooter hadn’t been taken out,” a man in Butler told me, “we would’ve made sure he didn’t walk out of there alive.” Meanwhile, in Bethel Park, another said coldly, “Too bad he missed.”
The divide is as wide as the state itself. But here in Butler, one conviction unites nearly everyone I met: they don’t believe what Washington is telling them. To them, the government’s version of events doesn’t add up—and until the truth comes out, the shadow of that summer afternoon will linger over western Pennsylvania.