Two years ago today, a 20 year old named Thomas Crooks climbed onto a rooftop 150 yards from a campaign stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, and opened fire on Donald Trump with an AR-15 style rifle. Eight rounds later, Trump was bleeding from the ear, a firefighter named Corey Comperatore was dead, and two other rally goers were fighting for their lives. Trump stood up, raised his fist, and shouted “Fight.” The image became instant history. What has not become history is the danger itself.
This anniversary should be a moment of national reflection. Instead it lands in the middle of a week where the sitting president had to quietly swap aircraft because his own Secret Service detail was not confident the newest Air Force One could protect him if something went wrong. Two years after Butler, protecting Donald Trump is still not a settled question. It is an ongoing, live operation.
Start with what happened in Butler itself, because the facts still matter. Crooks fired from an unsecured roof that local and federal law enforcement had failed to lock down, despite it having been flagged as a vulnerability before Trump ever took the stage. Comperatore died shielding his wife and daughter. James Copenhaver and David Dutch were both critically wounded. A bipartisan Senate task force later called the security failures “foreseeable, preventable, and directly related” to the shooting. Two years on, plenty of Americans still could not tell you the full story of how a gunman got a clean line of sight on a former and future president. That gap in public understanding is itself a kind of scandal.
Butler was not a one time scare. Two months later, in September 2024, Ryan Routh was found hiding in the shrubbery along the fence line of Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach with a rifle and a scope trained roughly 400 yards out. He was convicted on all five federal counts last September and sentenced in February to life without parole, plus seven more years for good measure. In February of this year, an armed man breached the secure perimeter at Mar-a-Lago and was shot and killed by security. In April, a gunman carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives opened fire near the security screening area at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He was later charged with attempting to assassinate the president. These are not rumors or fringe internet chatter; these are federal cases, convictions, and after action reports.
And now, this past week, the president left the NATO summit in Turkey on the older Air Force One rather than the newer Qatari donated jet, on the explicit recommendation of the Secret Service. To be precise about what is known: officials have said this was not tied to one specific, credible threat naming Trump by name. It was a precautionary call made as the conflict with Iran escalated, driven by real concerns that the new aircraft has not yet been outfitted with the missile detection and secure communications systems the older plane carries. That distinction matters, and it does not make the moment less telling. The Secret Service looked at the most dangerous plane on earth to attack, weighed the risk environment around an active Iran conflict, and decided the newer, shinier jet was not safe enough to trust with the president’s life. That is not a headline conservatives should shrug off. It is a headline that should worry every American, regardless of party.
Here is the argument the other side does not want to have honestly. For years, plenty of commentators and Democratic officials described Trump in the most extreme terms available: a threat to democracy, a fascist, a man who must be stopped by any means necessary. Words like that have consequences when they reach unstable people holding rifles. Nobody sensible is claiming every cable news segment causes a shooting. But when you spend a decade telling the country a man is an existential threat to the republic, you should not be shocked when someone takes you literally. The honest response to Butler was supposed to be a national lowering of the temperature. It did not happen. The incidents kept coming instead.
The other side will say Trump himself has used plenty of combative language over the years, and that is fair to note. But there is a difference between political rhetoric and organizing an actual assault, and only one side has produced a body count. Corey Comperatore is dead. That is not a talking point. That is a grieving family in Pennsylvania two years later, still waiting for a full accounting of how the day happened at all.
So mark the anniversary honestly. Say Comperatore’s name. Ask why the rooftop was unsecured. Ask why, two years and multiple attempts later, the newest Air Force One still is not trusted to fly the president through a live conflict zone. And ask, without flinching, whether the language aimed at Trump for the last decade has made this country safer or more dangerous. The threats have not stopped because the conditions that produced them have not been addressed. Two years is long enough. It is past time for a real reckoning, not another news cycle that fades by Friday.
