James Copenhaver, one of three spectators shot at the 2024 Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, has died at 76. In Maryland, a federal warehouse full of Butler lessons reports that none has ever been taken off the shelf. Its own roof, an audit finds, is unwatched.
"...and nobody has taken one out, not once, which we choose to read as reverence," said Harlan Mote, deputy keeper of the Federal Lessons Depository. He patted a cardboard box marked Butler.
The depository is a low brick warehouse off a Maryland ring road. It holds every lesson Washington has formally learned since the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. There are twenty-six boxes. Each arrived with a ribbon, a press release and a promise.
The lessons were back in the news on Thursday. James Copenhaver, one of three spectators shot that day, has died in Pittsburgh, his lawyer said. He was 76. He was hit in the arm and abdomen in the bleachers, and afterwards walked with a cane.
A 20-year-old gunman fired from a nearby rooftop. One bullet grazed Donald Trump's right ear. The rest of that afternoon has since been sorted, catalogued and shelved.
A building full of learning
Mr Mote would give tours, if anyone asked. He walks me past aisles of the lesson "watch the roof". Several agencies have filed it, in several fonts, and each is certain it thought of it first.
"This one came from the Senate," he said, lifting a lid. "This one's from the House. This one's from a panel that reviewed the other two. They agree completely. That's what makes them so restful."
"They agree completely. That's what makes them so restful."
I have stood in rooms like this before. The Titanic inquiry concluded, with great firmness, that ships should carry enough lifeboats. It was a fine lesson. The sea had already taught it, free of charge.
Then there was Chilcot, which took seven years to tell Britain what Britain had spent those years suspecting. The depository keeps a copy on loan. It sits on the top shelf, like an older brother who has seen how this ends.
The roof question
On Thursday afternoon, an internal audit found that the depository's own roof is not watched. It is flat. You can reach it by ladder from the bin store, and it overlooks the loading bay.
"We have flagged it," said Donna Pruitt, the audit's author, who works from a portable cabin across the car park. "We have written a lesson about it. That lesson is on its way over now. It'll go in box twenty-six, which still has room."
I asked whether anyone might simply climb up and look. She frowned, as if the question had arrived in a foreign language.
"Looking is operational," she said. "We're a learning function."
1981.
Nobody at the depository wanted to talk about 1981 either.
What gets remembered
Outside Washington, that afternoon took another shape. The photograph of the raised fist was a poster and a T-shirt with indecent speed. The bleachers got no poster. Bleachers rarely do.
This is the oldest routine in politics, and it never needs a rehearsal. The man at the centre becomes the story. The people in the seats become a figure, then a footnote, then a lawyer's statement on a Thursday.
"We did discuss a box for the spectators," said Mr Mote. "But spectators aren't a lesson. They're people. We don't have shelving for people."
Crispin Vail, spokesman for the depository's oversight board, said the board would meet to consider whether every lesson should now be learned again, from the start, in light of events.
"Relearning shows seriousness," Mr Vail said. "We'd like to relearn the lot by spring. Then we'll need somewhere to put it."
Plans for a second warehouse are well advanced. The preferred site sits beside an office block with a flat roof. The planning committee has been told. It has noted it.
I left as the light went. Mr Mote was dusting box twenty-six with real tenderness, the way a man polishes a car he will never drive. The roof above him was empty, for now. Somebody, eventually, will learn that too.
