Showing up,” political reporter Salena Zito argues in her book “Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland,” has become a political program. She revisits the train derailment victims of East Palestine, where residents told her that Trump’s visit communicated something the Biden White House did not: “unless you understood what it is like to be discarded as not important enough, Trump showing up for us showed he cared.”

This is well-trod terrain for those of us who grew up south of Butler along the Monongahela and the Yough — steel and coal towns turned logistics hubs and perhaps even AI server centers, union halls that primarily host local events but still smell like coffee and floor wax.

The coalition moved

I’m a center-left,

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