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Nearly a year after the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, journalist and author Salena Zito is speaking out about what she witnessed, and the personal conversations she had with Trump in the hours that followed.
“I see him grab his ear. I see the blood streak across his face,” Zito recalled during an interview on the “Brain Kilmeade Show,” Thursday. “I see him take himself down. That was my first indication that maybe he’s okay. Or at least he’s not as gravely wounded as I thought he might be because of the blood.”
Zito was in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13th of last year, when gunfire rang out at a Trump campaign rally. She had been scheduled to interview the president when the shots were fired by 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks.
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A bullet struck Trump in the upper ear, and several others were hit in the crowd, including firefighter Corey Comperatore, who died from his injuries.
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In her new book, “Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland,” Zito shares her firsthand account of the historic day.
“I heard everything,” she said of the chaotic moments after the shots. “Including his insistence to put his shoes on,” which she described as “comic relief” in the tense aftermath.
According to Zito, Trump called her the very next day to check on her and her family.
“He would go on to call me, it was a total of seven times that day,” she told Kilmeade. “We had some powerful conversations.”
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She said the president kept asking questions about the day, like why he decided to turn his head or face the chart onstage, a move which may have saved him from a far worse injury.
“He [Trump] comes to the conclusion, several times, that it was the hand of God,” said Zito, who explained the president believed he had been left alive for a reason.
“He was spared because he has been given a higher purpose than to just be a candidate for president,” she said of the emotional experience. “To be the best thing that he could possibly be for the country.”
In the moments immediately after the attack, Zito said Trump refused to be rushed off the stage, and that she chose to ask him about that decision.
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“He’s like, ‘I wasn’t Donald Trump in that moment. I represented the presidency of the United States,’” he told Zito. Trump went on to say he felt he needed to represent the “grit” and “exceptionalism” of the United States and prevent a potential panic in the crowd.
Zito said he told her, “I needed people to know that we go on, and we will always go on no matter what.”
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