Supporters Who Saw a Gunman Attack Trump Prepare to Welcome Him Back

When the balloons descended on Donald J. Trump at the finale of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Jondavid Longo, the mayor of Slippery Rock, Pa., was on the floor of the arena. As a few balloons popped, he glanced at the other Pennsylvania delegates he knew who, like him, had been at Mr. Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa., five days earlier. More than one of them winced at the sound.

“It was just such a strange experience for those of us who were there on July 13,” Mr. Longo, 34, said. He had asked his wife to stay with her parents while he was at the convention. “Something like that will make you feel uneasy,” he said.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump will return to the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds to rally once again at the site where a gunman nearly assassinated him as he held forth from the stage on July 13. Corey Comperatore, a former volunteer fire chief who was in the bleachers behind Mr. Trump, was killed as he shielded his wife and their two daughters from the gunfire, and two other rally-goers were wounded in the attack.

Mr. Trump’s return to Butler, a small rural community an hour outside Pittsburgh, is an act of proud defiance for a former president who has now survived two attempts on his life during this campaign. Some of his supporters plan to attend the rally as an act of defiance of their own. Others said they found the idea of returning to the scene of the shooting too daunting.

Mr. Comperatore’s family plans to be there. His widow, Helen Comperatore, said in an interview that it had not been an easy decision.

“To go back up to that site where my husband was killed, and open wounds that we’re trying to close — my kids haven’t even started to go back to work yet, and I was afraid it’d take them backwards,” she said. But ultimately, she said, “we decided this was something we needed to do.”

“We needed to go and honor Corey,” she said. “He would have done it for me.”

Some July 13 rally attendees spoke of a sense of connection with the former president forged in the assassination attempt and eagerly welcomed his return. “I’ve already got my ticket,” said Joel D’Alessandro, 51, a technology and media consultant from Beaver, Pa., who was in the front row at the July 13 rally when Mr. Trump was shot.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the campaign, said that “the willingness of Pennsylvanians to join President Trump in his return to Butler represents the strength and resiliency of the American people.”

Some who were present during the assassination attempt said that they blamed Democratic rhetoric for the attack, though no available evidence suggests that it motivated the shooter, Thomas Crooks. And many nurse suspicions about the security lapses that enabled the shooting, as well as the second assassination attempt in Florida two months later.

“I think the overwhelming majority of us think that something is not being told to us,” said Mr. Longo, who is attending Saturday’s rally.

Elected mayor of Slippery Rock, a small college town just north of Butler, in 2017 when he was just 27, Mr. Longo, a rising star in local Republican politics, had been invited to speak before Mr. Trump at the July 13 rally. In a video that Mr. Longo’s wife filmed on her phone, he can be seen beaming from stage right as Mr. Trump mouths “good job” at him from behind the lectern.

Minutes later, there was a loud pop.

A former Marine who served in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in 2010 and 2011, Mr. Longo felt the air pressure change in a way he recalled from firefights he had experienced. He threw himself on top of his wife. They had learned two weeks before that she was pregnant with their first child, a daughter.

“I was already terrified about the prospect of being a new father,” he said. In the seconds that followed, the wide-angled anxieties of a soon-to-be parent fought for space in his brain with the reflexive field geometry of an infantry rifleman. “Trump was 20 or 25 feet from my 12 o’clock,” he recalled. Immediately behind Mr. Longo, “15 to 18 feet from my 6 o’clock,” Mr. Comperatore was slumped over in the bleachers.

Mr. Longo would later see himself in video footage doing things he barely remembered. He had forgotten picking up an older woman who had fainted, and carrying her to the medical tent, until he saw himself doing it on the local news.

When he took the woman into the tent, he saw Mr. Comperatore, a project engineer for a plastics manufacturer in Butler and a former volunteer fire chief in neighboring Buffalo Township, whom many in the community knew personally.

Holly Socciarelli, 42, who was at the rally that day, lives just up the road from the Comperatore house, where she would see Mr. Comperatore playing with his dogs in the yard.

The owner of an eyelash extension salon, Mrs. Socciarelli had volunteered for Barack Obama in 2008, making phone calls to get out the vote, but later grew disenchanted with his presidency. By 2012 she was supporting Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican congressman who ran for president that year, and she had grown deeply opposed to vaccines. In 2016 she began supporting Mr. Trump, and she later got involved in local Republican politics.

She was sitting in the V.I.P. section a few rows below Mr. Comperatore with her sister and her 13-year-old daughter, Vada, when the gunman started firing.

The full gravity of what they experienced did not set in until the next morning. “The second I woke up, I just started thinking about it,” Vada recalled. Mrs. Socciarelli, too, woke up anxious. “I finally processed it — like, ‘Holy cow, we almost got shot,’” she said. She thought about how easily they could have been sitting where Mr. Comperatore and his family had been sitting.

They sat up on the porch until midnight that night, in the dark, talking. At school, many of Vada’s classmates shared her admiration for the former president, but a handful made jokes about how the shooter’s aim should have been better.

Butler is a decisively Republican county, where no Republican since Bob Dole has walked away with less than 60 percent of the vote in a presidential election. But one in three of its residents votes Democratic, and along the road between the Farm Show complex and the town proper, yard signs for Trump and Harris are often planted in adjacent lawns. Sometimes the signs are stolen.

Still, Republicans and Democrats in town both said that, pockets of online vitriol aside, things had mostly gotten back to normal since the shooting.

Jaxon Steele, 19, who works at Walmart in Butler while attending college at PennWest Clarion in neighboring Clarion County, was sitting near the front of the crowd during the shooting. Although he considers himself solidly Republican and pro-Trump, since the rally he had thought more about the increasingly apocalyptic tone of American politics.

“Even my grandparents, they say, you know, ‘This election is going to be it,’” he said. “‘If they don’t get Trump in, it’s going to be the end.’ Well, I’m not positive of that, because we felt that with Joe Biden.”

Others found their politics sharpened by their experience on July 13. Danielle Kramer, Mrs. Socciarelli’s sister, said that since the shooting she had become more outspokenly pro-Trump on social media. “After this, I don’t care anymore,” she said.

Mrs. Kramer, 49, voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 and did not vote at all in 2016. She said she had not been particularly political until the Covid pandemic “really opened my eyes to a lot of things,” and made her a Trump supporter. “The stuff that was happening was changing the fabric of our culture and society,” she said.

She had mostly avoided talking about the July 13 rally — her first — except with a few people she knew who were there. She also spoke about it by phone with her son, a caterer in Las Vegas who happened to be working at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival there in October 2017 when a gunman killed 60 people and wounded hundreds more in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. Her son hid in a refrigerated trailer as the crowd stampeded away from the gunfire.

“We can’t believe that it happened to both of us,” Mrs. Kramer said.

She owns a military-style rifle herself, and said neither shooting had affected her support for gun rights.

“If you take the rights away from law-abiding American citizens, a lot of them are going to turn their guns in, but you know who’s not going to? All these Venezuelans, all these Haitians, all these gang members,” she said, referring to immigrant groups that Mr. Trump has demonized often in recent speeches. “Especially with what’s happening in this country now, people need to be able to protect themselves.”

Since the Las Vegas shooting, her son “doesn’t like to be around big crowds anymore,” Mrs. Kramer said. “I don’t know how I feel about it now.” She had talked about going to the rally on Saturday with her sister, but they had decided against it.

“I hate to use the word trauma, because I’m not a baby,” Mrs. Socciarelli said. But she did not think she could return to the Farm Show grounds, at least not yet.

“I understand why he’s doing it,” she said. “He wants to show strength and that he’s not afraid. I’d like to be that way too. But I’m not going to go back.”