After Donald Trump survived a shooting at a campaign rally that officials were investigating as a domestic terror attack and an attempted assassination, the former president suggested he had been changed by the near-death experience and wanted to project a message of unity.
But two days after Trump said he would try to bring the country together, it was unclear whether the message would catch on – and how long it might last.
Trump told the New York Post in an interview on Sunday that he had intended to deliver biting remarks against Joe Biden in his speech at the Republican national convention until the shooting at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, prompted him to throw it out.
Trump is understood to have been reworking his remarks with his speechwriter Ross Worthington since the shooting, according to a person close to the former president, and has discussed making himself sound like he is still the president, as opposed to just a candidate.
The conventional political approach to a unity theme would revolve around calling to move past partisan divides or to tone down incendiary rhetoric, but whether Trump adopts or sustains such a message remains unclear.
It may yet be that Trump now considers himself as the unifier-in-chief – taking the mantle from Biden who campaigned on that message in the 2020 election to great effect – and will leave it to his surrogates pursue the more caustic and ad hominem attacks against Biden. This was on display to some extent in speeches from senators and allies at the convention on Tuesday night.
Still, at an event hosted by Georgetown University on the sidelines of the Republican nominating convention, Trump’s co-campaign chief Chris LaCivita suggested the unity messaging would not come at the expense of winning the election in November.
“This is obviously an opportunity to bring our country together. But let’s not forget we’re in the middle of a campaign,” LaCivita said. “Our focus is very much on putting everything back squarely on the issues that are hurting everyday Americans and providing them an answer to those.”
At a separate event on Tuesday hosted by Axios, Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr, suggested that even if Trump shifted to a gentler tone, his core political attacks were likely to continue.
“You can be nicer on the margins but you still have to call out insanity when you see insanity,” Don Jr said when asked about more caustic language turning off potential voters, for instance on transgender issues. “That’s different, that’s not about tone.”
Don Jr also said that even though he believed that Trump’s unity tone would last until the vice-presidential debate, he expected Trump to counter-punch if attacked by Biden, who recently urged the country to tone down the political rhetoric in a televised address from the Oval Office.
“I think he’s going to be tough when he has to be,” Don Jr said when asked if Trump’s tone will be permanently changed. “That’s never going to change. He’s not going to just take an attack. My father will always be a fighter, that’s never going to change, but he’s going to do his best to moderate that.
“He’s never going to stop being Trump when attacked, that’s what makes him an effective leader because he doesn’t cower under fire – quite literally.”
Don Jr’s comments may be the rationalization that surrogates and top Republicans have been searching for, after struggling to balance the unity message with attacking Biden often using jarring language in front of a Republican party animated for years by Trump’s partisan grievances.
The test of whether Trump will lead the effort to promote a spirit of unity, or whether it was more of a directive aimed at his surrogates, will probably come on the final day of the convention when he delivers his speech on Thursday.
