The Republican National Convention has officially kicked off in Milwaukee Wisconsin, and a cloud of anxiety looms heavy over the events following Saturday’s assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
On Sunday, President Joe Biden spoke from the White House and issued a call for Americans to embrace “unity.”
For once, Trump and Biden might be on exactly the same page. In a Sunday interview with The Washington Examiner, the former president said that he had largely discarded the speech he’d planned to give at the RNC on Thursday, in favor of a rewritten discourse promoting national unity.
“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” Trump told the Examiner, “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”
“It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance,” he added.
In a Sunday interview with The New York Post, Trump expressed gratitude for surviving the close call with a sniper bullet. “By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here,” he said. “The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” the former president added. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead.”
Trump reiterated to the Post that he had “prepared an extremely tough speech, really good, all about the corrupt, horrible administration,” for the RNC, but “threw it away.”
“I want to try to unite our country,” he explained, “But I don’t know if that’s possible. People are very divided.”
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson told Axios on Monday that he believes that Trump’s shift from his usual abrasive style of politics is “real.”
“Getting shot in the face changes a man,” Carlson, who is in regular contact with the former president, added.
In a Sunday Truth Social post, Trump wrote that he would not be changing his travel plans to Milwaukee in light of the shooting, and arrived in the city later that afternoon. “I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else,” he wrote.
Amid concerns that the attempt against Trump’s life will further escalate tensions in an already tumultuous election cycle, the RNC has also reportedly instructed speakers — presumably excluding Trump — to not make changes to their convention speeches.
“Only thing that we were told is they are going to figure out who they want to talk about it,” Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told NBC News. “It was to avoid having 100 speakers saying the same thing.”
Another source told NBC News that “Trump is setting the tone, and the tone is business as usual.”
But while the former president is making a public showing as a conciliator in the aftermath of the shooting, only time will tell if his pivot is permanent. As Trump’s allies and other prominent Republican commentators attempt to weaponize the shooting into a political cudgel against Democrats to silence criticism of Trump and his track record endorsing political violence, it may only be a matter of time before the former president slips back into his old habits