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But in her own report, Zito clarified that Trump actually called her eight times on July 14. The first call was to say he was sorry for missing their meeting.
That wasn’t a press stunt. It was something deeper.
During those back-to-back phone calls, Trump returned to the same question over and over again—why did he suddenly look to his side at the exact moment the shooter pulled the trigger?
That split-second movement may have saved his life. And Trump had a powerful explanation.
“He comes to the conclusion, several times, that it was the hand of God,” Zito said.
Trump told her directly that he believed he was “spared because he has been given a higher purpose than to just be a candidate for president.”
In Zito’s new book, Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland, she dives deep into the conversations she had with Trump on the day after the attack.
Those phone calls show a man shaken—but not broken. They reveal a leader contemplating his own mortality and what it meant to survive such a brutal attempt on his life.
“He thinks the hand of God has been there many times, but he was sure he never thought about it when it happened,” Zito said.
Reflecting on everything he’d endured—the impeachment trials, the legal witch hunts—Trump told her: “I got impeached twice, the endless court cases, so when I think about it, while none of that compares to what happened yesterday, I cannot dismiss that God has been with me.”
Then he added, “This time, though, it was a big one.”
Zito pressed Trump about why he didn’t just flee the stage. Why did he raise his fist and shout “Fight! Fight! Fight!” instead?
Trump’s answer was pure presidential grit.
“He’s like, ‘I wasn’t Donald Trump in that moment. I represented the presidency of the United States,’” Zito quoted him saying.
He believed showing strength was more important than showing fear. Trump felt he needed to embody the “grit” and “exceptionalism” of the country at that very moment.
With blood dripping down his face and danger still present, Trump’s first instinct was not to escape—but to reassure the American people.
“I needed people to know that we go on, and we will always go on no matter what,” he told her.
Trump’s survival didn’t come without heartbreak. Firefighter Corey Comperatore, a father and hero, died shielding his family during the attack. And Trump couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Zito’s conversations revealed just how much Comperatore’s death weighed on the president. It wasn’t political. It was personal.
Trump was grappling not just with his own survival—but with the lives that were lost protecting others.
According to Zito, the assassination attempt changed Trump’s entire mindset going forward.
She told the Washington Examiner that during his first term, Trump governed like “a man on a mission.” But now? Now he’s a man who sees time running out. His sense of urgency is different—more intense.
In his mind, Zito said, this second term might be his last shot to deliver real change. And he believes God kept him alive to do exactly that.
Trump reportedly told Zito he now views himself as having “a purpose that I didn’t understand that I had before.”
Zito’s firsthand account makes one thing crystal clear: while the corporate media clings to narratives, the real heartbeat of this country is being ignored.
According to Zito, legacy outlets assumed their worldview would define the 2024 election. But they failed to understand that “big cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. don’t decide who wins election cycles, but people in places like Butler, Pennsylvania, sure do.”
And the people of Middle America saw something the elites never will—a president who stared death in the face and came out believing he was saved to finish the job for the American people.
