Gene J. Puskar/AP; James West/Mother Jones
Reneé White, 57, was standing on the bleachers right behind former President Donald Trump in the “tight shot” for the campaign cameras on Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania. It was a long day waiting in the baking heat and White, who had traveled from Newland, North Carolina, was decked out in a pale “Tiffany” blue “Mean Tweets” T-shirt and a matching Make America Great Again t-shirt she picked up from Bedminster, Trump’s golf club in New Jersey. (The color was an ode to the former First Lady, Melania, she said.) She enthusiastically cheered on her candidate, as she has done at more than 30 previous rallies.
Then she heard gunshots. “Everybody’s dropping around me. And I’m just sitting there like it’s like an out-of-body experience, okay?” she said, still wide-eyed with adrenaline—and wearing the same clothes—two days later when I met her in Milwaukee, where she’s attending the Republican National Convention. “Then I heard ‘shooter down, shooter down.’ And then I was like, oh my gosh. Like, this is really happening.”
Amidst the “crying and shaking” all around her, White saw Trump emerge, an image now seared in her mind as a singular, historic vision of defiance. “He’s saying ‘the fight is on.’ We’re going to fight harder. We’re going to keep going.”
In league with Trump, who shouted “fight” several times in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, White suffused our interview with defiant language. She used the word “fight” or “fighting” over 20 times across our roughly 25-minute conversation. Her message to Donald Trump: “Keep fighting the fight, and we’ve got your back. Keep fighting the fight. We’ve got your back, for sure.”
The Butler rally was a galvanizing moment for White, 57, and her fellow travelers (one of whom livestreamed our interview to MAGA fans). “This will make them more determined to go and be a part of it,” she said of campaigners and rallygoers fueling Trump’s campaign. The shooting created new momentum, White said, and “the supporters won’t want it to stop.”
After sleeping in her car all night after the attack, she made the flash decision to drive from Pennsylvania to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I thought, hell, when you fall off that bike, you get right back up,” she said. “I’m going to the RNC.” She didn’t have credentials to be in the room; she just knew she wanted to show her support.
What now? White says her movement has never been more unified. “I think his poll numbers will go up incredibly,” she said. “I think it’s going to bring unity because like after 9/11 and after John F. Kennedy or Reagan or whatever, people came together because they’re appalled that something like this could happen.”
White wanted to be at the January 6 rally that led to the Capitol insurrection, and railed against the treatment of attendees that day while reeling off a litany of now-familiar grievances about what Trump fans see as injustices caused by attacking Trump, and liberals pitting “one color, or one race or one religion against each other.”
White, the definition of the Trump faithful, knows she’ll remember Saturday and the assassination attempt forever. “I’m glad I was there,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
