He finds a picture from a cemetery. This is his father’s grave, and smoothed over the top of the headstone is a massive red, white, and blue “Veterans for Trump” sticker. Jim’s father passed away in 2009, but he knows both his parents would have loved Trump.

It’s 2 in the afternoon in the 13,000-person town of Butler. It is, of course, newly famous for what transpired the night of 13 July, when a bullet clipped Trump’s ear and the former president rose from a Secret Service pile, turned to the crowd, and implored them to “Fight, fight, fight.”

J.D. Vance is due to speak at 4:30, followed by Trump at 5:00. Secret Service drones fly overhead. One curious attendee asks a cop to point out which building the would-be assassin fired from back in July, yet nobody feels unsafe.

It’s business as usual here in northwestern Pennsylvania. Regulars greet each other with familiarity as Trump’s warm-up speakers build suspense. One of them quips that Trump rallies feel like rock concerts but without weed, and a man walks by me in a t-shirt emblazoned with the moment Elon Musk smoked marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Musk is due to speak later with Trump, but beforehand Vance cites scripture from the stage as an audience member angrily yells about the “fucking Democrats”. A man from Kentucky named Raymond tells me he’s here to be part of history.

And the scene is eerily familiar. There’s the enormous American flag suspended between two cranes, framing the podium perfectly. The sky is bright blue, as it was on 13 July. The parallels are impossible to miss because images of that day are everywhere: on yard signs as you drive through town, on t-shirts in the audience, on the jumbotrons.

The most poignant reminder is a firefighter’s jacket emblazoned with Corey Comperatore’s name, propped upright in the bleachers where he was fatally shot while shielding his family from a hail of bullets. “Corey was one of us,” someone shouts from the crowd. When Eric Trump takes the stage, he soothes: “This is a family.”

Vance is applauded wildly, especially as he taps into mounting rage over the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene. “When Appalachia was underwater, remember President Biden was sitting on a beach and Kamala Harris was in a San Francisco fundraiser,” he says.

Then it’s Trump’s turn. He walks to the podium with masterful choreography, including a video of the July rally and a live performance of “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood himself. Trump speaks movingly about Comperatore before bringing out Musk, who receives thunderous applause and asks people to register to vote.

As the sun sets and a the massive flag behind Trump takes on a golden hue, the former president settles into his rhythm, and quickly it becomes clear the most remarkable part of the evening will be the evening itself. People who fled gunshots at a political rally returned, quite literally, to the scene of the crime. People who underwent extreme trauma, including Trump himself, walked back into a lookalike rally, where the temperature was a bit cooler, the dusk came a bit earlier, and bulletproof glass encased the podium.

Musk at one point theorises that if Trump lost, this could be the “last election”. Over and over again, speakers argue this is the most important election in the country’s history.

As Trump bops onstage to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and the crowd soaks in its last glimpse at his return to the site of the shooting, I think back to Jim. Maybe five minutes after we finished chatting, he pulled me back to look at his phone, once again at a picture of a headstone.

It was his uncle’s. Jim asked me to look at the dates. His uncle died in the Pacific at the age of 21, hit by Japanese machine gun fire in 1945. Referring to Trump, Jim says: “That’s why we need him. Right guy at the right time.”

Not just in Butler but across America, where images of Trump’s resilience will no doubt be the abiding memory of the campaign, many voters may be feeling the same.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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