Opinion: Yes, the Assassination Attempt Changed Trump. It Made Him Even Worse

Well, that didn’t last long.

Our former president nearly lost his life when a bullet shard of glass grazed his ear. Which isn’t to minimize the very real assassination attempt that cost one man his life and put two others into the hospital. Fortunately, the assassin’s target survived with minimal injuries. Afterwards, Donald J. Trump declared himself a changed man.

Speaking to the Washington Examiner ’s Salena Zito the day after, Trump declared himself touched by God. “Everything changed in that moment,” Zito quoted Trump as saying in an interview with CNN’s Abby Phillip. “For the country and for himself.”

Zito told Phillip that Trump was now going to focus on “bringing the country back together. He thought it was very, very important. In that moment, when that happened to him, he understood this was what he was supposed to do… what he was meant to do.”

That sounded to my ears very much like a man humbled, and I welcomed that new humility.

At first, it appeared as though Trump really had changed. He seemed subdued during the first few nights of the RNC, although perhaps his lethargy came from the fact that he had a pillow taped to his head. Regardless, even I could see what MSNBC’s Katy Tur described to Chuck Todd:

“Chuck, last night looking at Donald Trump, I know we’ve been talking about this, but I think it bears having another conversation. I’ve never seen him with that look on his face. I’ve never seen him walk into a room and look overwhelmed in that way. It also seemed emotional. Can we honestly ask whether a brush with death has changed him?”

Yes, Katy, we can ask. And then he opened his mouth and gave us the answer.

All eyes were on the former president as he delivered, for the third time, his presidential nomination acceptance speech. Would this time be different? For years now, we’ve been hearing about Trump’s “new tone,” which has always sounded a lot like the old tone—vicious, belligerent, unintelligent, meandering, and racist.

But maybe—just maybe— in missing the president’s head, perhaps the bulle t shard of glass pierced his heart.

Trump began his speech by describing the harrowing moment when the gunshots first rang out. He then honored the two who were injured and the retired firefighter, Corey Comperatore, who lost his life at that rally while shielding his family from harm. Comperatore’s misspelled fire uniform stood beside the former president, and when the former president kissed the dead man’s helmet, you could almost hear the entire nation say, “Ew. Gross.”

From there, the speech devolved into the familiar Trumpian digressions, malapropisms, and delusional narcissism. But at least the speech was also interminable. While my hopes for the “new” Trump were low, even I felt let down by how this life-altering experience seemed to alter this man’s life not at all.

He sucked before the assassination attempt and, if anything, he sucks more now for having learned nothing.

But, of course the “new tone” was never going to work. How could it? His people want cruelty. They want name-calling and viciousness. They want the HILARIOUS nicknames—I mean, “Laughing Kamala?”—that’s just comedy gold! She really does have a sense of humor! Devastating. They want the meandering, nonsensical story in which he celebrates the “late, great” cannibal Hannibal Lecter.

I’m not sure if they exactly want to hear him explain, for the thousandth time, how he would prefer to be electrocuted than eaten by a shark. but they got that, too. They got all the hits at his rally Monday, the first time he appeared with his running mate, J.D. Vance . As for “bringing the country together,” the task he understood from God that he was “meant to do,” Trump said the following in a posting on Truth Social: “As you’re seeing, the Democratic Party is not the party of democracy. They’re really the enemies of Democracy."

That should bring together, Don. And so, in the spirit of comity this moment demands, I say to my former president: Fuck you.

While I was skeptical of Trump’s newfound faith and spirituality, I also know that trauma changes people. Those who experience near-death experiences commonly report that they emerge as fundamentally different people. More compassionate, less materialistic, less self-centered. So I was at least willing to extend a measure of grace to Trump, and to entertain the fantasy that even he, a man devoid of compassion, obsessed with materialism and himself, might come out of this changed.

Well, I’m an idiot.

Not sure where I go to get a refund on the grace I extended to the man. Possibly the same place I go to get a refund on my worthless Trump non-fungible digital tokens or my worthless degree from Trump University.

Consider, for a moment, the glide path he could have flown towards Election Day if he’d actually changed, or pretended well enough to convince us he had. The reason so many Americans tuned into his speech on the final night of the RNC is because we’re starving for strong leadership whose strength resides in our humanity, not wrapped in the barbed wire of grievance and vengeance-seeking. Even those like me who despised the Trump of old thought maybe—just maybe— the new Trump might adopt a little of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.”

(Of course that was before Dubya killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for no reason.)

But no. We got neither compassion nor conservatism. Instead, Trump has returned to form. His social media account has been a bullhorn of bullshit, like this treat from Monday:

“They try to make Crooked Joe into a brave warrior because he didn’t have the ‘guts’ to fight it out—He quit! They then tried to make ‘Sleepy’ look like a great President—he was the WORST, and Lyin’ Kamala into a competent person, which she is not.”

As well as amplifying messages like this from one of his supporters:

“WE ARE WITNESSING ONE OF THE GREATEST CHAPTERS IN OUR ENTIRE LIFETIME. THIS IS CLEARLY A WAR OF GOOD VS EVIL!”

Nothing unifies a nation like describing your political campaign as “good versus evil,” presumably with the raping, felonious, racist con man cast as the “good” side. Meanwhile the former California attorney general, former senator, and current vice president—who has never, to my knowledge, received 34 federal convictions nor had to pay over $80m in restitution for raping E. Jean Carroll—is the “evil” one.

The one who wants to round up 10 million undocumented immigrants and throw them into internment camps—that’s the good guy?

The one who wants to expand health care, protect women’s right, and continue managing the strongest economy in the world—that’s the bad guy?

Same as it ever was, Donald. Same as it ever was.

I don’t doubt that Trump was profoundly rocked by his experience at that terrible rally. I don’t doubt that the next few days he spent on the golf course were given to contemplation. Nor do I doubt his gratitude at surviving when another did not. But I can’t believe that the lesson he learned from this life-changing experience was to become an even bigger dick than he was before.

I am, of course, joking. It’s exactly what I expected.

Read more at The Daily Beast.