Analysis | Even Donald Trump can’t shift the momentum of Trumpism

“I hate to say it, but the rhetoric around him over the last few weeks that if he wins an election, our country will end, our democracy will end. It’s the last election we’ll ever have,” Jennings said. “These things have consequences, okay? I don’t know what the motivations of the shooter are. I don’t know any of the details. But I know the rhetoric around Trump has grown extreme.”

This sentiment has emerged often over the past two days in different manifestations. Jennings was correct in saying that he didn’t know what motivated the shooter; even on Monday morning that isn’t clear. But he assumed that the motivation was linked to the “extreme” rhetoric suggesting that Trump was a threat to American democracy. By extension, then, those expressing concern about Trump’s politics were culpable for the shooting — a link made more explicit by some in Trump’s orbit.

Many Trump supporters view these concerns as fundamentally illegitimate, if not cravenly opportunistic. Jennings appears to be among them. To some extent, this reflects how much erosion the country has already seen: Trump’s explicit effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election is retconned as appropriate or insignificant, largely because it was unsuccessful. Any critical observation of what an unfettered Trump might do in a second term is waved away as extreme, just as pre-2020 concerns were breezily dismissed.

It is also obviously useful for Trump supporters to argue that the shooting was downstream from unacceptable criticism of his candidacy. The presidential race, at least until Saturday afternoon, was heavily driven by the same dynamic at play in 2020: Trump supporters eager to vote for Trump and Biden supporters eager to vote against Trump. This is in part driven by concern about American democracy during a second Trump administration. If that concern can be reframed as melodramatic or dangerous — or if Trump supporters can cow Democrats into not elevating the issue — the impulse to vote against Trump might be muted. Some Biden supporters might simply stay home.

Since the shooting, Trump has given several interviews to friendly writers. Speaking to the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito, for example, Trump indicated that the attempt on his life prompted him to rethink what he would say during his acceptance speech at the Republican convention this week.

“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” Trump told Zito. “The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago.”

At Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen leaned into this idea: Maybe Trump really can bring the country together.

“Imagine he gave a speech featuring something he rarely shows: humility,” they wrote. “Imagine him telling the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language — and now realizes words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins.”

This idea that Trump has the opportunity to reform his approach to politics and/or unify the nation is as old as Trump’s career as a national politician. And, sure, maybe this time it will happen, who knows? But after he won the election in 2016, he claimed that he would seek to unify the country. That quickly manifested as an insistence that Americans should rally around his presidency and his policies. Trump is nearly 80 years old and has been the same political actor for fully 10 percent of his life. The odds that this pattern is reshaped by the shooting — an unquestionably reprehensible act and an obviously dire threat — seem low. His first instinct in the moment on Saturday was to exhort the crowd to “fight.”

The idea that concern about Trump is rooted in his rhetoric or his brashness is a common one. His supporters say things such as that they are fine with a few “mean tweets” from Trump, as though that is the focus of his opponents. It isn’t. His critics, like his supporters, focus on what he does and what he hopes to do. Telling America that he’s been “too rough, too loose, too combative with his language” will almost certainly not convince anyone, but it also ignores the point: Will he still try to deport more than 10 million people? Will he still try to overhaul the federal government to install political loyalists?

Trumpism has grown well beyond Trump. Tucker Carlson is scheduled to speak at the Republican convention this week; his rhetoric about immigration and the war in Ukraine helped reshape how Trump’s base viewed both issues. Trump has the fervent support of a number of other far-right voices, like Jack Posobiec, who last week described the right’s opponents as “unhuman” and “atheist Marxist globalists.” Is the idea that Trump’s shift to positivity will somehow trickle down to his most fervent supporters and that their tone, too, will shift? Or that they’ll accept his reshaping his political agenda to appeal to more moderate voters?

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has been singled out for criticism by the Biden campaign and Democrats because it outlines what right-wing supporters of Trump want to see should he return to the White House — including a centralization of power in the chief executive that would erode democracy. A shift in tone from Trump at the convention won’t somehow relegate that document and its authors to insignificance. It’s still the vision embraced by the right. And Trump has proved to be malleable in the face of criticism from his base; his shift on vaccines is evidence enough of that.

Trump credits his thankfully minor injuries from the assassination attempt to his having fortuitously turned his head to make an observation about a chart being displayed on a screen in front of the crowd. That chart had been shown before; it provides a misleading and exaggerated assessment of border crossings under Biden as part of Trump’s rhetoric about the dangers of immigrants. It’s a good reminder that the issue for his opponents isn’t that Trump uses mean words when describing his policies; it’s that they object to the policies and the dishonesty used to promote them.

In another address on Sunday night, Biden reiterated that the way to stop Trump was not with violence but at the ballot box (though he said “battle box,” a reminder of the political conversation before Saturday). This was a way to subtly contrast himself with Trump, reinforcing that democracy is the mechanism for allocating power in the United States.

It was a change in tone, but not in policy.