There was a fleeting moment after the first attempt on his life that we saw an unfamiliar Donald Trump emerge, playing the role of conciliator-in-chief. For a day or two, he urged national unity. It didn’t last, of course.
The more familiar (angry, resentful and conspiratorial) version took over at the Republican convention soon after, despite the efforts of party image-makers to portray a different Trump – a loving family man who they claimed had been changed forever by his brush with death in Pennsylvania.
Now the former president appears to have reverted to type even more quickly after a second attempt, this time by a gunman on his golf course in Florida.
He rapidly issued a fundraising email that declared: “Nothing will slow me down. I will NEVER SURRENDER!”
The defiance encapsulated in that (shouty ALL CAPS) language harked back to his bellowed vow to “FIGHT” as he held up his fist to the jittery crowd in the Pennsylvania field in mid-July.
Then, it rapidly became received wisdom that the 2024 White House election was now Trump’s to lose, as the Republican bathed in the iconic imagery and a wellspring of voter sympathy.
But that all got upended just a week later, when President Joe Biden withdrew from the race in favour of Kamala Harris, producing a still-more compelling narrative of a biracial woman now pulling ahead on the long road to November.
Trump has been on the back foot ever since, struggling to regain the narrative control. In a race defined by shocks, his team will be hoping that the incident in Florida could give him the opportunity to seize the story (and polling lead) back.
Top allies such as House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson and New York Representative Elise Stefanik insist that divine providence intervened to save Trump’s life, just as they say it happened in Pennsylvania.
With the polls giving Harris a slender margin in key battleground states, Trump needs all the support he can get – including from his base of evangelical Christian voters.
He needs it all the more after he fumbled his TV debate against Harris last week – indulging his worst instincts instead of taking the attack to the vice president.
Both he and running mate JD Vance haven’t helped themselves with their attempts at damage control, persisting with the ridiculous claim that Haitian immigrants (living in the United States legally) are busy dining out on pet cats and dogs in Ohio.
Thus the timing of the thwarted golf course attack is giving rise to outlandish conspiracy theories that it was all staged to benefit Trump. The same claim was made about the Pennsylvania attack.
Neither of them were, even if both incidents raised valid questions about planning by the Secret Service, the FBI and local police.
Then again, Trump’s entire political career was built on a conspiracy theory (that Barack Obama faked his birth certificate) and has been stoked by a persistent lie (that Biden stole the 2020 election). So it can’t be a huge surprise if some people refuse to believe him now.
While he may again emerge strengthened politically for now, Trump can’t count on the Florida attack giving him any lasting benefit. Things keep happening in this race with head-spinning speed.
This is likely to register in future as just another one of those things, with even political violence getting depressingly normal in this tumultuous campaign.
