(NewsNation) — The indelible image of Donald Trump raising his fist defiantly after a failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., is burned into the collective memory.
Salena Zito, who was at the scene where Trump was wounded, later asked him why he said, “Fight, fight, fight” as he was hustled away by Secret Service agents.
“He said, ‘Well, in that moment, that wasn’t about me. That wasn’t about Donald Trump. That was about everything that America stands for … America’s always stood for vitality and strength and courage under fire, and I knew that the country needed to see that — that the country was okay and that we would go on,’” she recalled Sunday on the first anniversary of the deadly incident.
Zito, a journalist and author who has written a book about the potentially history-changing moment, was among the guests who joined NewsNation senior national correspondent Brian Entin for a special report examining the event and its aftermath.
The evening of July 13, 2024, 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto a building near a campaign rally where Trump was speaking and fired several shots toward the then-former president as he sought to recapture the White House. Crooks was killed by a counter-sniper’s bullet, but not before he grazed Trump and wounded three audience members, one fatally. Corey Comperatore, 50, was killed as he tried to shield his family.
The president on Sunday credited God with sparing him.
“It’s a little bit of a dangerous profession, being president, but I really don’t like to think about it too much. I think you’re better off not thinking about it,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews.
For the people who do think about the failed assassination attempt, surprisingly few answers have emerged to explain the motivations of Crooks, a gifted college student and nursing home worker, or the security lapses that put Trump in such a vulnerable position. Last week, six agents were suspended after a Secret Service investigation.
“In order to succeed in a zero-fail mission, you have to have redundancies, and they had redundancies, all right — they were all redundancies in failure.” said Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, member of a House task force that tried to assess mistakes that led up to the shooting. “This was bound to happen, considering how lackadaisical and complacent the Secret Service had become.”