Trump’s Return to Butler Is Sure to Be a Spectacle. Is It Safe?

At a time of increased security risks, the former president has urged thousands of supporters to return with him to the place a gunman tried to take his life.

Five days after being shot by a would-be assassin in Butler, Pa., former President Donald J. Trump stood onstage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, surrounded by images of his blood-streaked face. “I will tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time,” he said, “because it’s actually too painful to tell.”

And then he spent the next 12 weeks talking about it. He stitched the shooting into his campaign narrative about the “them” — the Democrats, the Deep State, the Marxists and the news media — trying to stop him at all costs.

On Saturday, that effort will culminate in a dramatic return to the scene of the shooting. It is a moment Mr. Trump has been hyping for weeks as a one-time-only, can’t-miss event. “We’re going back to Butler, too, by the way,” he said at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., on July 31. “People said to me, ‘Are you serious?’ I said: ‘I’m serious. We’re going back.’”

A few days later, he told the people of Bozeman, Mont.: “We’re going back to Butler. You know that, right?”

“We’ve got to go back to Butler,” he said.

There is little precedent for what Mr. Trump is about to do. Other presidents have been shot and shot at. None have returned to the scene of the crime 12 weeks later to throw a huge campaign rally.

The moment illustrates the contradictions between Mr. Trump’s public statements about his security concerns and his private willingness to take risks. He insists on going back to Butler even as he complains that the U.S. Secret Service and the Biden administration have not properly protected him and has suggested, without evidence, that there are political motivations behind the security failures.

Since the first Butler rally, on July 13, there have been more threats on Mr. Trump’s life. There was a second assassination attempt in September, at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla., and there have been threats against him from Iran. He has been forced to alter his travel schedule at times, and his campaign has had to modify or cancel some events.

Agents on the presidential protective detail — the group assigned to guard President Biden — are helping to prepare for the rally on Saturday. The agency has also been receiving help from the Pentagon and, as it has since August, will use ballistic glass, generally reserved for the president and vice president, to help keep Mr. Trump safe.

But even with the enhanced protection, the event has worried some law enforcement officials who have protected presidents in the past. Paul Eckloff, a former Secret Service agent who protected Mr. Trump when he was president, described the event as “ill-advised.”

The former president’s return to Butler is difficult to square with his own recent comments about his sense of safety, or lack thereof. In an interview with NewsNation on Wednesday, he said he is “always worried” about security at his rallies.

“I think that the White House isn’t treating us very good,” he said. “We’re entitled to security.”

‘Unprecedented security times’

It has always been a unique challenge to protect Mr. Trump, who thrives on interactions with large crowds and loves to mix it up with supporters and with members of his golf clubs.

Secret Service members who were assigned to him during his presidency and afterward say that what happened in Butler was in many ways unsurprising.

One former agent who regularly accompanied Mr. Trump to golf outings at his club in suburban Washington when he was president said that agents often discussed how shockingly easy it would be for a sniper to shoot him from a camouflaged position in the woods.

“All you’d need is a ghillie suit and a high powered rifle with a scope,” he recalled, referring to a grass bodysuit sometimes worn by hunters. (The former agent requested anonymity to discuss private conversations he had with fellow agents.)

Something close to that scenario nearly came to pass on Sept. 15, when a gunman hid in the bushes of Mr. Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, only to be shot at by Secret Service agents walking ahead of the former president on the course who spotted a gun barrel poking through the foliage.

“Trump is clearly more risk tolerant than some other protectees,” said Donald Mihalek, a former Secret Service agent who protected a number of presidents, including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate. “Trump enjoys the big outdoor rallies. He seems to enjoy being out with people, which for the Secret Service, is always a challenge versus behind a closed door or in a real secure environment.”

The assassination attempt in Butler has taken a toll on the agency. The service’s director, Kimberly A. Cheatle, has stepped down. Six agents involved in the event were placed on restrictive duty in its aftermath.

The Butler shooting has also spawned dangerous conspiracy theories.

The Secret Service counter sniper who took the shot that killed the assailant has received threats of violence and has needed extra security for his personal safety, according to a Secret Service official and a former agent with knowledge of the situation. The animus toward the counter sniper, the former agent said, has come from people who appear to believe, without evidence, that the counter sniper was working against Mr. Trump and hesitated to fire on the assailant.

In the aftermath of Butler, the acting director of the Secret Service, Ronald L. Rowe Jr., has said Mr. Trump is receiving the “highest levels” of protection that the agency can offer, tapping outsize resources compared with those marshaled for other former presidents.

Last weekend, for instance, Mr. Trump attended a University of Alabama football game that drew 100,000 people. Because he had initially considered walking out on the field, the agency called in some 600 personnel, pulling from the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies as well as its own ranks, according to a Secret Service official who requested anonymity to describe private planning.

In the end, the field appearance was scuttled, said the Secret Service official.

On other occasions, the Trump campaign is said to have bristled at the Secret Service’s suggestions for reducing risks. A Pittsburgh field office agent, who was assigned to help secure the grounds for the Butler rally in July, told Senate investigators that the campaign staff had declined to take measures that would have helped block the lines of sight of a potential rooftop shooter.

The campaign staff lead “said ‘no’ to everything that we suggested,” the agent told Senate investigators. The agent tried to tell the campaign official that more proactive measures were needed, she testified, but “everything that he said was ‘no, no, no.’” She added that the official responded by saying: “‘I have a press shot. I want to get my press shot.’”

Danielle Alvarez, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, denied that the exchanges occurred as the agent described them and pointed to testimony from a different service agent that denied the campaign pushed back in that way.

But a Secret Service internal review of what went wrong at Butler has found that service agents were overly deferent to Trump campaign staff members in making security decisions, according to a person familiar with the findings.

Ms. Alvarez said that while Mr. Trump had confidence in the dedicated service detail that traveled with him, if other service agents were overly deferent to the campaign in planning the rally, that meant they failed to do their job.

“The responsibility of U.S.S.S. is to protect President Donald J. Trump,” she said. “Based on the sworn testimony, they abdicated that responsibility and their dereliction resulted in President Trump shot in the ear, one death and injuries to others.”

Mr. Eckloff, the former agent, said there is always a give-and-take between the staffs of presidents — or presidential candidates — and the Secret Service about what constitutes acceptable risk.

During the early days of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, there was a learning curve for his staff, Mr. Eckloff said. “I wouldn’t call it friction,” he said, describing it instead as an “education for both sides.”

And there were times when Mr. Trump ignored the Secret Service’s advice — something other presidents have done as well.

“Those negotiations can be difficult in any presidency,” Mr. Eckloff said. “We’re just facing unprecedented security times.”

‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’

In the weeks after the attack, Mr. Trump used the shooting to briefly call for unity, to go after his political rivals and to cast himself as a martyr. He has even used it to make money. A company he owns sold out of $299 limited-edition high-top sneakers bearing an image of his bloodied face from that day (They were sold on GetTrumpSneakers.com).

His return to Butler seems meant to conjure a spectacle. On Thursday, he posted on social media a promotional image of his bloodied face with his fist raised in the air (“BUTLER ON SATURDAY — HISTORIC!”), and Elon Musk has said he will attend Saturday’s rally (presumably with his own ever-expanding security apparatus). It is not difficult to imagine how it might go: Mr. Trump recreating the defiant pose he struck in the first place — raising his fist in the air while the crowd roars. Fight! Fight! Fight!

In some respects, he is echoing other presidents who survived assassination attempts and used them for political gain.

After Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest in Milwaukee in 1912, he cultivated an image of a man who was almost invincible. “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!” he famously said. (The day Mr. Trump was shot, Mr. Musk posted on X: “Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt.”)

After John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan at the Washington Hilton in 1981, he, too, tried to use the moment to his advantage. “Reagan and his image-makers milked the assassination for sympathy and built support for his tax plan,” David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University, said this week. “So while Trump may be more egregious in this respect, he is operating in a familiar tradition.”

And yet, by going back to Butler, Mr. Trump is also doing something totally unfamiliar.

Mr. Reagan never invited his supporters to any sort of public demonstration at the Washington Hilton. Franklin Delano Roosevelt never threw a rally in the Miami neighborhood where a bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara fired a revolver at him.

“It’s hard to imagine John F. Kennedy holding a press conference or a campaign rally at Dealey Plaza had he survived the attempt on his life,” said Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University who is writing a book about presidential assassination attempts and political violence in 20th-century America.

“Trump’s return to the scene of the crime is not just unprecedented, but reveals something else,” Mr. Dallek said. “His is a far darker approach than his predecessors’ to surviving a close call. None of the presidents and former presidents targeted by assassins exhorted their followers to ‘fight’ an unnamed evil in the aftermath of the attack.”

Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting from Washington.