Trump supporters who were at Butler rally say they’re bonded to him and fired up for November

MILWAUKEE — A week after Jondavid Longo leapt on top of his wife as the pop of gunfire pierced the hot July air at a rally for former President Donald Trump, he stood in Fiserv Forum and watched Trump accept his party’s nomination.

Longo, who had just found out his wife is pregnant, said he kept thinking as he lay on the ground that he had two lives to protect. As he looks ahead to fatherhood, he said the moment has made him even more committed to helping Trump win the presidency in November.

“We heard the same gunfire, we saw him drop,” Longo said from the floor of the convention. “... Everybody around the world now sees the strength and steadfastness of President Trump. Him raising his fist defiantly after almost being killed by that bullet, that was a message to everybody around the world, to people who were on the fence about him, he’s the man and he’s the man for the job in this moment.”

Trump gave the most anticipated speech of his reelection campaign Thursday as he stood next to a firefighter’s helmet and uniform belonging to Corey Comperatore, who died in the shooting at his rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13. The 93-minute speech, the longest in convention history, was filled with falsehoods and appeals to the hard-right MAGA base that cheered him on. But it started with an uncharacteristically personal account of the assassination attempt.

“I’m not supposed to be here tonight. Not supposed to be here,” Trump said as the crowd chanted back, “Yes, you are.” Trump continued: “I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God.”

The shooting made it harder for Democrats in the immediate aftermath to directly attack Trump, whose extreme policies and violent rhetoric have been a hallmark of his political brand since he first ran in 2016. But by the end of the convention — and Trump’s speech, Democrats pounced on the GOP’s calls for mass deportation and pointed to several moments throughout the week when the GOP seemed to undercut its own calls for unity with disparagement and fearmongering.

But for Trump supporters who were at the Butler rally, some of them delegates who sat near the front of the stage at the convention last week, the shooting didn’t just leave an indelible imprint in history and on the presidential election. It also shook their sense of safety at the rallies they’d attended and elevated the man who had already become more than a political hero.

”I think I’m still processing it, being there and now being here,” said John Grenci, an alternate delegate from Butler. “It’s a part of history.”

Trump remains deeply unpopular with the majority of voters in most polls, but the idolization among his core supporters is arguably unmatched in modern political history.

“I do believe God saved Trump from the bullet that day,” said Michael McMullen, a delegate from Pittsburgh who attended the convention each day in a different sports jersey representing his hometown teams. “With that fist, he said, we’re battle-ready, battle-tested and we’re gonna win.”

The Trump fans sitting in bleachers behind the podium in the 90 seconds seen around the world are now frozen in history.

Vince Fusca is one of them. He stood out in a fedora and gray Trump T-shirt, a shock of black hair framing his face. In the moments after the Secret Service jumped on Trump, Fusca stayed standing as people around him ducked.

“I was totally stunned, dismayed. I felt helpless,” said Fusca, who drove to Milwaukee the day after the rally to attend the convention.

A longtime Trump superfan, Fusca has attended at least 10 Trump rallies. He’s also developed something of an alt-right cult following. He has attracted wild theories — which he laughed off — among so-called Q-Anon conspiracists that he may actually be the late John F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the 35th U.S. president, in disguise. Kennedy died in a plane crash in 1999.

As Fusca sifted through the Trump merchandise packed floor to ceiling in his white van in a parking lot in Waukesha, Wis., this week, he said the moment “changed everything and also nothing.” He’ll never forget the fear of thinking Trump was dead, but he’s unsure how it will impact voters in November.

“July 13 will be a long ways away,” he said. “When people go to the polls, will it be on their minds? I don’t know. It’ll be on mine.”

Sarah Phillips isn’t a frequent public speaker, but in the last week she’s given two addresses she’ll never forget: She opened the rally in Butler and she spoke on night three of the Republican National Convention.

“I thought honestly it was firecrackers until I looked at the president’s face and I saw the fear in his eyes,” said Phillips, a petroleum engineer and advocate for the energy industry from Cannonsburg, Pa., recalling the shooting.

Phillips, 37, is still marveling at how calm and kind people were that day. No one ran. No one was trampled. People stayed with the victims until medics arrived.

Trump commended the crowd in his speech, too.

“This beautiful crowd, they didn’t want to leave me,” Trump said at the RNC. “They knew I was in trouble. They didn’t want to leave me. And you can see that love written all over their faces.”

Phillips had largely supported Trump because of his pro-energy stance, she said, but the moment tied her more closely to him. “When you hear him in the mic go, ‘wait wait wait’ — he risked his life to address his people.”

For GOP Senate candidate David McCormick and congressmen who were at the rally, it became part of their stump speeches this past week and will likely continue to be a part of the Republican political narrative.

“You saw his instincts when he hit the deck,” said U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser (R., Pa.). “He’s a very, very tough guy. He wanted to let everyone know he was OK, and in doing so, he made everyone else feel OK.”

Moments before the shooting last weekend, Trump had started to call McCormick to the stage and then changed his mind, pivoting to talk about the border.

McCormick called Trump the day after the shooting. He said Trump brought up how close he was to being onstage with him in that moment.

“I thought he was gonna say, ‘you could have been shot,’” McCormick told the Pennsylvania delegation Thursday in Milwaukee. “And he goes ‘you woulda been in prime time.’”

Trump knows how to create a TV moment, and his convention was full of histrionics. People in the audience started wearing bandages on their ears to mimic Trump’s. The former president said a bullet “pierced” his ear. His campaign has not released information on his injury or treatment.

For people from Butler, the site of the farm show where 4-H kids showed their animals will now forever be the scene of an attempted assassination. U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly grew up in the area and used to play baseball there.

“When everyone started erupting chanting ‘USA!,’ it just made you proud and it made you think about what’s really important,” Kelly said. “We’re so energized right now. I don’t think I’ve seen more domestic energy than we have right now.”