How long will this softer, unifying version of Donald Trump last? Let’s see how the convention goes
Donald Trump, having somehow survived the assassin’s bullets, says he now wants to be the peacemaker, the unifier, the calmer-in-chief of a shaken America.
He is promising a Trump Mark 2, a softer version of himself which is so at odds with anything in his 78-year-old history that it will be greeted with understandable scepticism.
This is almost certainly less a metamorphosis driven by a near-death experience and more a political calculation by Trump that this is the best way forward at a time when the country is looking for calm.
Trump said he had rewritten his speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week to call for unity.
“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” he said.
How long this Trump Mark 2 will last is anyone’s guess but it is still the right tone to strike now, ahead of the most important week of his campaign when he will be crowned as the presidential nominee at the convention.
Trump is the street fighter, the scrapper who has built his political persona on an “us versus them” divide. But he is also a canny reader of the national mood and can sense voters are worried, in the wake of the assassination attempt, that passions in this election campaign are spiralling out of control.
In the hours after he was shot, many Republicans vented their fury on social media, with some blaming the rhetoric of the Democrats and even Joe Biden, for creating a mood that led to the attack.
Just as suddenly, Republicans have dropped their attacks on Democrats and have joined Biden in calling for unity and for Americans to come together at this time.
This is the theme Trump wants at this week’s RNC – a party that takes the high road after a grievous assault on its leader, rather than a party that acts as an attack dog on Biden and the Democrats.
Trump’s defiant fist pumping moments after he was shot in the ear at the Butler rally will guarantee him an even more raucous reception at the RNC.
He will be greeted as a hero and the sympathy he has gained from the attack would be needlessly reduced if he sought to whip up divisions rather than unify.
Yet Trump’s whole political modus operandi relies on promoting that “us versus them” divide.
He thrives on the politics of grievance and he is a master of it. So can we really imagine that he can change his stripes overnight and spend the next 3½ months on the campaign trail calling for unity and calm?
It is not the way that Trump operates.
We can expect that the RNC will deliver a more restrained series of speeches in Milwaukee that it would have before the attack on its leader.
Trump will also surely fulfil his own promise to deliver a more positive speech at the convention than he might have otherwise.
But we can expect that this halt in hostilities is nothing more than a brief ceasefire.
Trump is the frontrunner in this election because he is Trump.
He won’t win by trying to be someone else, which is why Trump Mark 2 is likely to be a temporary blip.
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