By The New York Times (U.S.) | Created at 2024-10-05 09:07:32 | Updated at 2024-10-05 11:09:27
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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.”
