(WHTM) — Many people are shocked by the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, but a Pennsylvania-based author and journalist said they shouldn’t be.

Salena Zito was just feet away from Donald Trump when he was shot last July and has written a book about it.

“I’ve known that young man since he was 18 years old,” Zito said about Kirk. “I just happened to be watching Charlie lives when that happened, that just gutted me. It was absolutely awful. That brought me to tears.”

Zito doesn’t cry easily. She was a political reporter for decades, so she’s seen a lot.

“I’m old enough to remember JFK,” Zito said. “His brother, Bobby, Martin Luther King, but also Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. And I often wonder, was politics really at the heart of it, or is it a mental illness? I just often wonder if that is sort of the bad guy.”

Zito was to interview Trump after this rally and was just feet away when shots rang out. She recounts in her book that Trump called her several times the next day, believing God intervened to save him.

“To hear him tell me why he decided to say, ‘fight, fight, fight,’ fight,'” Zito said. “He said, ‘See, that wasn’t me in that moment. It was about the presidency. We have an obligation as presidents to project strength so that the country feels safe, that the country feels strong.'”

Much of the country feels strongly that Trump’s a threat to democracy, calling him a dictator, and worse. Zito says voters in places like rural Pennsylvania didn’t buy it.

“He told people, ‘I see, I see you, and I respect the dignity of work,'” Zito said. “He didn’t just blow apart the Democrat Party. He blew apart the Republican Party as well.”

Zito also blames national reporters, mostly based in New York and D.C., for missing and dismissing rural America.

“They don’t know someone who sits in a pew every Sunday or owns a gun or knows how to shoot a gun,” Zito said.

But Trump knows Zito. He’s given her amazing access and his cell number. But she pushes back at suggestions she’s more advocate than a journalist.

“I have the same access with Josh Shapiro and every other president that I’ve covered,” Zito said. “I interviewed Hillary Clinton more times in 2016 than I interviewed Donald Trump.”

Zito dismisses complaints that Trump bullies reporters who ask tough questions. Says that comes with the job. So does she disagree with any of Trump’s policies?

“That’s not my job,” she said.