If there was a single thing Donald Trump could do to guarantee his reelection in November, it would have nothing to do with his running mate, his fundraising or the states his campaign puts at the top of its priority list.
Instead, the single change would address the No. 1 complaint I hear from middle-of-the-road voters about him — the way he talks about and treats some people. Instead of being cruel and demeaning toward women, Democrats, minorities, immigrants, the press (you name the group), they wish Trump could be positive. They want him to be constructive. They wish he would be presidential.
Many Trump supporters don’t agree. In fact, the former president’s style of “telling it like it is” is what they love about him. But of the voters who oppose him, his heated rhetoric is the part many would do away with first.
We’ve been waiting for the “presidential” pivot from Trump since he first burst onto the scene in 2015. Maybe he would change, people thought, after the blowback he got for saying Sen. John McCain was “not a war hero.” Or once the “Access Hollywood” tape revealed his willingness to exploit and assault women. Maybe he would act “presidential” once he became president. It never happened. Maybe losing would make him see a majority of Americans had rejected his ways.
In reality, no amount of success or failure ever changed Trump’s instinct to attack when attacked or to demean a person when he could rise above a fight.
And he has remade the Republican Party in his image, with new, younger Republicans parroting his caustic tone, and plenty of Democrats have learned that conflicts and controversy raise more money, more quickly than a reasonable negotiation ever did. And standing on the sidelines are exhausted American voters, wondering how it all got this bad.
As recently as his Saturday afternoon rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump was in his usual form. Moments into his speech, he had already attacked the “fake news media,” “Crooked Joe Biden” and “laughin’ Kamala Harris.” He called one of Pennsylvania’s Democratic senators “a stiff” and wrongly insisted, again, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“It was rigged, it was a rigged deal,” he said.
Then, midway into describing immigrants as “millions and millions of people pouring in from prisons and from mental institutions,” shots rang out and the former president vanished, for just a moment. He rose with blood spattered across his face, and he raised a fist among the Secret Service agents as they pushed him off the stage. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” he yelled to the crowd, which returned a chant of “USA!”
And then he was gone.
The Trump we’ve heard from and seen in the three days since then has been noticeably different from the one on stage that day. If dodging an assassin’s bullet doesn’t change a person, it’s hard to see what would.
On Sunday morning, he posted a note to Truth Social that made it sound like he had literally found Jesus. “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” he wrote, and then he offered prayers for the injured and dead and saying that he would “fear not” in the face of evil.
In a phone call the next day with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, Trump was asked whether the events of the weekend had changed him. “I don’t like to think about that, but yes,” Trump said.
Karl also asked him about the phone call that Biden had placed to him after the shooting. Biden had earlier called on Americans to lower the temperature of politics in the country. And he told NBC News’ Lester Holt that he had called Trump to speak directly after he was shot.
“I told him how concerned I was and wanted to make sure I knew how he was actually doing,” Biden said. “He thanked me for calling him. I told him he was literally in the prayers of Jill and me, and I hoped his whole family was weathering this.”
Recalling the conversation from his perspective, Trump said Biden “couldn’t have been nicer.”
If you didn’t know which two men were having that conversation, you’d never guess it was Biden and Trump in the midst of what both of them have called a fight for the future of America as we know it. You wouldn’t know it was the two candidates most people say they don’t want to choose between in 2024, the two men in the middle of this sad, ugly fight.
In one more interview he has done since the attempt on his life, Trump told The Washington Examiner’s Salina Zeto that he decided to totally rewrite the speech he had planned to deliver in Milwaukee before everything happened.
The one he had prepared was going to be “a real humdinger” he said. We can only assume it would have taken direct aim at Sleepy Joe, Laughin’ Kamala, the Deep State, immigrants, cities, liberals and other Americans, deemed enemies, whom he’d mocked over the years.
His new speech isn’t that, he said at all, he said. “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance.”
On Monday night, Trump made his typically dramatic entrance into the Republican convention hall. With Lee Greenwood singing “Proud to Be an American,” and loyal Republicans in the hall roaring their appreciation. He walked slowly onto the stage. But with his ear bandaged and his gait slower, he looked different. He almost looked humble. He certainly looked changed.
It’s hard to believe that Trump will really embrace a message of unity for the long term after rising so high by stoking divisions and grievances. And he’ll have to bring along fellow Republicans who have embraced his ways.
Nothing Trump has ever said or done would justify the violence against him on Saturday, whether people agreed with him or not. But a humbler, unifying Trump would go a long way toward draining the vitriol in American politics, no matter who wins in November. The country wants it. We all need it.
We’ve been told to expect the “presidential pivot” before and it never materialized. This time, the change could be for good.
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