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Some say Trump won a second term one year ago today when his head was almost blown off on live television. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. Luck was most certainly on his side that bright, beautiful day in Butler, Pennsylvania. I’d been looking forward to the rally because he was returning to a place made almost famous in MAGA lore by Tucker Carlson, who explained Trump’s appeal better than anyone else ever had.So when Trump was almost assassinated, the first question I had was Why Butler? Even one year later, it seems odd that it happened there, especially since US intelligence already knew Trump’s life was threatened, and outside in Butler, there were many rooftops, and many ways to climb on top of them. It wasn’t secure, but then again, MAGA rallies seemed like the last place anyone would get away with shooting Trump. In September, another assassin would give it a shot, a burned-out Gen-X surfer dude who wanted to “save democracy.” But one year after Butler, it’s as though the tragedy never happened at all. The Left never fully absorbed it and is awash in assassination porn every day, and the Right, well, let’s just say there are many forces at work to break up the grassroots movement otherwise known as MAGA.Here is a look back at the good, the bad, and the ugly of this past year. The GoodOne year after Butler, Trump’s presidency has been a smashing success when you look at everything he’s accomplished, from the historic bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities to the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, to passing the One Big Beautiful Bill, and several key Supreme Court decisions in his favor. The tariffs seem to have worked out, and the economy is humming. One year after Butler, the Secret Service has been overhauled. They will continue to reform the agency, they say, to prevent something that catastrophic from happening again. One year after Butler, Corey Comperatore is remembered as a hero. He protected his family from gunfire. But to those he left behind, they don’t feel like there has been enough closure on the case - how could they have left them unprotected? But on Saturday, the community came together to honor Corey with a motorcycle ride called Corey’s Cruise:Corey’s Cruise, that’s the MAGA spirit. Paying tribute to one of their own.One year after Butler, journalist Selena Zito published the definitive account of that day. A Pennsylvania native, Zito captures Butler and cares enough about the place and its people to tell the story of its history and why it mattered that Trump came to Butler at all. He’s the only sitting president ever to do so, she says. Zito has seen Trump in a way no other mainstream journalist ever has, and even tops Tucker Carlson, I think, in explaining Trump and his appeal. Maybe because she knows the time and place of which she writes, or maybe it’s something else, an ability to see what other people can’t. One year after Butler, it has been promises made and promises kept for people like me. I voted for Trump for two reasons. To protest the unprecedented, authoritarian lawfare by Joe Biden and the Democrats and to put an end to the gender madness that was destroying the minds and bodies of children. It is still hard for me to believe this is going on in America with no guardians on the Left to protect kids. When I see videos like this, I am reminded of why I voted for Trump and why I would vote for him a thousand times over:One year after Butler, the Trump administration is going after John Brennan and James Comey for Russiagate:Matt Taibbi has been on the story for years and goes into it at length on America This Week.The BadOne year after Butler, Elon Musk, who said he became a Trump supporter that day, is now a Trump hater, someone so filled with rage and resentment that he started his own political party just to hurt Trump. And said on Twitter that Trump is in the Epstein Files, which put the whole ugly scandal into motion.The truth? Musk was likely burned after Trump shut him out of the inner circle. The richest man in the world might be among the most fragile, and hell hath no fury like an Elon scorned.Tucker Carlson is parting ways with the Trump administration because of Iran and Israel, now proclaiming Israel is the one behind the Epstein cover-up. He’s also saying, in his recent speech for Turning Point, that it’s no big deal to kick biological men out of women’s sports. Who cares? One year after Butler, fair weather MAGA like Andrew Schultz, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan aren’t ride or die Trump supporters anymore. They chose him at the time as the better option, but if Trump doesn’t give them exactly what they want — not fund Ukraine, wash their hands of Israel, or reduce the government deficit, whatever it is, they’re free agents now ripe for the picking.One year after Butler, a war has broken out between the head of the FBI, Dan Bongino, and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the promised release of the Epstein Files. MAGA wants Bondi to be fired or to step down because of it. She made it seem like there was a client list and they would be naming names. But then abruptly announced that no, there isn’t one and case closed.So Trump has had to take to Truth Social to defend her and try to steady the ship, but more and more people are reading this like a cover-up. In other words, MAGA is leading a Watergate-like situation to take down its own leader. into its own leader, doing the Democrats’ dirty work without even trying:Both the Left and the Never Trumpers are using the Epstein case in hopes of dividing and conquering MAGA. And from the looks of it, they’re winning. It reminds me of that song from U2, So Cruel, “I gave you everything you ever wanted, it wasn’t what you wanted.”Even though the Democrats had the files all through Biden’s presidency, they are counting on people being stupid enough to believe them when they pretend to care:The UglyOne year after Butler, almost no one cares about the shooter, Thomas Crooks. He is a ghost. If Thomas Crooks had succeeded, would he have been made a hero like Luigi Mangione? Is that what he was seeking, that kind of adulation and respect? He was not only a nobody, a loner, but like so many others, spent his formative years on lockdown, online. Who knows who got to him?One year later, the lesson was not learned because the tragedy was never fully absorbed. All they knew was that they were angry the shooter missed. We have to assume that, yes, Crooks would have been remembered well if he hadn’t. Instead, he was shot and killed in the blazing sun on a rooftop at just 20 years old. One year after Butler, comments like this are not just accepted but encouraged. Nothing has changed for the Democrats and the Left; their propaganda press and the so-called “resistance” have not done a single thing differently after their defeat. They didn’t absorb what happened on their side, the debate, the cognitive decline, the George Clooney op-ed, and Kamala Harris’ terrible campaign. If anything, they’ve become even more emboldened to amplify their hate against Trump, as if they never saw him shot at all, as if they didn’t just suffer the greatest political humiliation in modern American history. But they did. We were there. We saw. All it’s meant to them, one year after Butler, is that they have to wish harder for Trump’s demise. They have to get louder and meaner. One year after Butler and the Left still have no power except for one Democratic Socialist on the rise, who is leading them even further into fanaticism. The day I called Trump “My President”If I’d never left the Doomsday Bunker and found my way to watching a MAGA rally, I’d have never humanized Trump either. I, too, might have said about both of these attempted assassinations, “Too bad he missed.” But I did escape. I had to leave when the hatred I was engaging in made me feel sick. I knew I had to do something to understand better why we were on one side and they were on the other, and why we felt it was okay to treat half the country like human garbage.At first, the MAGA rallies were like homework. I was looking for the smoking gun. Was Trump really Hitler? Was he a bigot and a racist? No. He was just someone who didn’t follow our strict rules of language, which had become so rigid that we didn’t even know what basic words meant anymore, like man and woman. Over time, the rallies became, for me, the one bright spot amid a long, miserable, dark winter. They were celebrations with happy people. None of them judged each other. All of them were part of an America that people like me had abandoned long ago. Finding my humanity in 2020 would change the course of my life, something I could never have predicted would hit me in middle age. All I knew was that I had to do what I thought was the right thing, and humanizing my enemies was it. So, of course, I was watching Trump’s rally in Butler. I wouldn’t miss it. When I saw Trump was shot, I said, “Please, God, not my president.” My president. I didn’t vote for him in 2020, so how could he be my president? And besides, he hadn’t even won yet.I can’t really explain it except to say that by then, I knew the forces that had been marshaled to remove Trump from power by any means necessary, and there were only a few months left before it was too late for them. Would they really go this far? Could they? Would it have been like shooting fish in a barrel to find vulnerable people who might want to make something of their miserable lives by becoming famous for taking out Public Enemy Number One?I guess it’s as Rupert Pupkin says in The King of Comedy, “better King for a day than schmuck for a lifetime.”One year after Butler, we’ll never know the answer to that. If there ever was any evidence, it’s long gone by now. It could just be that lockdowns caused real harm to the minds of the young, especially young men, and no one has bothered to look into it.One year after Butler, I know I made the right choice when I voted for Trump. I’ll be forever grateful to him for rescuing this country and its children from the clutches of fanaticism. And you can’t watch as many rallies as I have and come away not liking the guy. Those still awash in rage and delusion might find, decades from now, that they missed out on one of the most spectacular moments in American history when this country elected one of its brightest lights. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe