Donald Trump is a changed man. We know because he has said so.
He has framed his near-death experience at the Pennsylvania rally at which a sniper tried to assassinate him in spiritual terms. He has said,”God alone…prevented the unthinkable from happening.” A chorus of MAGA supporters have joined in the opinion that “God protected Trump.” Trump has said that a doctor who was treating his wounded ear said, as so many people do with Trump, “he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle.”
Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that God apparently did not care so much for the life of the spectator killed at the Trump rally…or for that matter the dead in Uvalde, or at the Tree of Life Synagogue, or at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, or at Sandy Hook, or at Parkland High. Who are we to judge how Trump was affected by the experience? Let’s take him at his word and see whether he behaves any differently.
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He has told reporters that in the wake of the shooting, he has torn up the barn-burner of a speech he intended to give at the Republican national convention and that he wants to take a different tone. You know, something like that in the deeply weird letter to America allegedly written by Melania Trump in the wake of the shooting, the one in which she both said the shooter “recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine” and in which she—or ChatGPT—wrote “Dawn is here again. Let us unite. Now.”
About his speech, Trump, showing his new softer side said, “I had all prepared an extremely tough speech, really good, all about the corrupt, horrible administration.” Then he added, “But I threw it away.” He then said, “I want to unite our country.” Which is an idea that held up during his conversation with with New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin all the way until when asked about how he would change his tone that policy differences were, in Goodwin’s words, “the stumbling block.”
But has he changed? As soon as the dismissal of the classified documents case was announced Monday, Trump took to Truth Social to call for the dismissal of all the other charges and cases he faces, overseen by a “Democrat Justice Department.”
Just preceding this, others reporting on the alleged transformation of Trump and the implication for his convention speech including Byron York writing for the Washington Examiner. He quoted Trump as saying “I think it would be very bad if I got up and started going wild about how horrible everybody is and how corrupt and crooked, even if it’s true.” (OK, Mr. Convicted Ex-President, we see what you’re doing there.)
So now, as we wait and see if Trump channels a new saintly side, his own party has been having trouble doing the same in the days since the shooting.
Don Jr. and J.D. Vance and Tim Scott and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all the usual malevolent loons in the hours after the attack said Democrats and their words were responsible for the fact that Donald Trump was put within millimeters of his demise in Pennsylvania over the weekend. Alex Jones, who has been bankrupted by his lies trying to deny the suffering of the children and parents at Sandy Hook, said that the shooting was the first step in a Deep State attack on America. He tweeted, “Elon you should get to your bunker immediate, this is a live coup.”
Some went further. Representative Greg Steube of Florida wrote, “They tried to jail him and now they’ve tried to kill him.” Representative Mike Collins of Georgia said the orders for the shooting came from Joe Biden and that the president should be indicted. (He didn’t mention that if the president was behind the shooting in his official capacity that he would actually be immune from prosecution.)
When Trump and the convention participants say they are seeking unity, what they really mean is that they want Democrats to stop using words like “fascist,” “authoritarian,” and “criminal” to describe the MAGA-GOP’s fascist, authoritarian, criminal leader.
How do we know? Because they started doing it within moments of the shooting, before the blood had even begun to dry from brutal wound caused by the sniper’s bullet “ripping through the skin” of the former president’s upper ear.
What you will not, of course, hear from the new Mother Teresa-like Trump or anyone close to him are the words, “Enough! It is time to end the sale of the kind of semi-automatic weapon that is the instrument of death of choice of mass shooters across America!”
Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump is whisked away by Secret Service after shots rang out at a campaign rally at Butler Farm Show Inc. on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Jeff Swensen/Getty ImagesYou will not see Trump step to the podium and say, “Because there is never any excuse for political violence in America, I renounce my own role in contributing to the toxicity of American politics.” We know that because Trump never apologizes for anything. We know it because his first words following the shooting, “fight, fight, fight!” were a manifestation of that. And we know because we know Trump to be the number one instigator of political violence in this country, the number one contributor to the toxicity of the current environment.
Trump is the one who instigated and later celebrated the single largest act of political violence in modern American history—the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He is the one who implied the proper response of his supporters to the Biden Administration would be “bedlam.”
He is the one who defended the marchers in Charlottesville even though they had blood on their hands. He is the one who has regularly promoted violence against political enemies from rally podiums very much like the one he hid behind this past weekend. He is the one who proposed using the government of the United States to intimidate and brutalize peaceful protestors and his opponents. He is the man who has made retribution the stated first mission of the next Trump administration should there be one.
Trump in fact bears a major share of the responsibility for creating many of the conditions that in turn led to a shooting in which he himself was the target. And we should be very clear that in blaming the left for what happened on Saturday, his supporters, those closest to him, are already making it likely that further violence will occur.
What is more, the optics of the convention, however faux enlightened they may be, will not mask the real mission of Trump and MAGA, a mission that involves a different kind of political violence, that which is sponsored by the state against its opponents, those it views as undesirable and the values, standards and laws that are the bedrock of our system of government.
That is a much more dangerous form of political violence because of the power of the U.S. government, because of the hate which guides it and because we know that it will lead to the end of democracy in our country and the beginning of a dark authoritarian future.
So, don’t fall for the “I’ve found Jesus moments.” (In fact, judging from the tendencies of Trump and some of his most out-there supporters, I would be especially wary of presentations or implications that Trump didn’t find Jesus, but that he actually was Jesus. Listen as they try to spin a narrative that not only was Trump prosecuted on behalf of his supporters but that now, he has bled for them, faced death for them.)
Rather, watch carefully this week and beyond as Trump and his MAGA supporters will do what the authors of authoritarian regimes always do—they will imply or argue directly that divisions and extreme views in America demands not only churchy words but, and here’s the kicker, their strong handed leadership. They will directly or indirectly, this week or later, use the shooting as an example of conditions that can no longer be tolerated—despite the fact that they played the predominant role in creating them. And so they will argue that the country needs a government that will put down the enemies of the peace—even though they are the real enemies of the peace. And they will argue that will require certain freedoms to be stripped away, certain aspects of the Constitution to be suspended.
How do we know? Because they have also already also said that. In fact, it is a centerpiece of their Project 2025 Plan for turning the U.S. into a white male Christian dominated autocracy. (Think that’s an exaggeration? Read it for yourself.)
It doesn’t violate President Biden’s admonition in his 8 p.m. Sunday address to the nation that we take the temperature down a bit in U.S. politics to describe a fascist as a fascist, or a coup instigator as a coup instigator. In fact, were we to fail to speak the truth about the threat we face we make it more likely that the dangers we rightly fear will be realized. No, Biden rightly urged us to avoid violence. That should go without saying. But one of the most important ways we can do that is to identify those, beginning with Trump, who are sources of violence and division and to describe clearly the threat that their history, the people they surround themselves with and the words they continue to use, suggest they pose.
