Can Trump become a unifier?

Donald Trump has been revising his big convention speech in light of his brush with death at the weekend. “I basically had a speech that was an unbelievable rip-roarer,” he told two interviewers yesterday. 

It was brutal — really good, really tough… I threw it out… 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. Had this not happened, we had a speech that was pretty well set that was extremely tough. Now, we have a speech that is more unifying.

Trump the Unifier-in-Chief? His many enemies would scoff at the thought. But one of the reasons Trump is such an effective political campaigner is that he has strong intuitive sense of what others are thinking. He knows that a news event as dramatic and disturbing as Saturday’s assassination attempt has the power to change an election. And he knows that acts of violence lead to hopes for peace.

He’s Donald Trump, not Mahatma Gandhi

He understands opportunity, too. His convention speech was always going to be a big political moment; now it could be almost era-defining. If Trump is able to touch the hearts of voters who have previously considered him beyond the pale, he could win by a landslide in November. That’s a big ask and he knows it. 

‘I’d love to achieve unity if you could achieve unity, if that’s possible,’ he said. ‘There are many good people on the other side… But there are also people who are very divided. Some people actually want open borders and some people don’t want open borders. The question is: can those two sides get together? Can sides where you have people who want to see men play in women’s sports and you have a side that doesn’t understand even the concept of allowing that to happen [get together]?‘

In other words, he wants unity, not compromise. If he is to achieve peace it will be through strength. If the other side gets “nasty,” as he puts it, he will get nasty back. He’s Donald Trump, not Mahatma Gandhi.

But political calculations aside, a bullet whistling through a man’s ear may well lead him to reconsider the meaning of his life. Trump seems for now to be preoccupied, understandably, with how close death came to him on Saturday evening in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he told his interviewers, reliving the exact moment he tilted his head and how that saved his life. He survived “by luck or by God,” he said.

In 2020, when he caught Covid, Trump also appeared to think he was experiencing some great dance with destiny. “It’s going to disappear. It’s disappearing,” he declared from the White House balcony. But that was amid the madness of pandemic and he lost the election that year. His near assassination and 2024 are shaping up quite differently.

Watch more from Freddy Gray and Kate Andrews on SpectatorTV:

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.