Donald Trump Cannot Even Pretend to Change Who He Is
In the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Sophie Lennon decides to abandon her commercially successful, bawdy shtick to adopt a new persona as a respected actress for Miss Julie, a serious highbrow play. But plagued by her own narcissism, and beset by insecurities, she finds herself unraveling onstage and abandons the script mid-show to revive the character that made her famous.
Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention followed the same predictable arc.
In the immediate aftermath of the failed assassination attempt, Trump announced he was tearing up and rewriting his speech. Reporters breathlessly declared a new speech would herald the arrival of a new man altogether. “Republicans who have observed and spoken with former President Donald Trump say they have detected a new softness to the man,” reported Politico, hilariously.
“Almost dying rocks perspectives — and people,” speculated Axios. “Yes, Trump has shown little appetite for changing his ways, tone and words. But his advisers tell us Trump plans to seize his moment by toning down his Trumpiness, and dialing up efforts to unite a tinder-box America.”
This obviously doomed prediction suffered from two flaws — one mechanical and one psychological. The mechanical flaw is that Trump rarely sticks to the text of his remarks. While it is almost certainly true that he rewrote the prepared text of his speech, that had only the loosest relationship to the speech he delivered.
The prepared remarks, circulated to the national media, came in at a tight 3,000 words. The section in which Trump recounts his near-death experience is recounted in his own fourth-grade level vocabulary, making it highly plausible he personally wrote or dictated the section himself:
It was a warm, beautiful day in the early evening in Butler Township in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Music was loudly playing, and the campaign was doing really well. I went to the stage and the crowd was cheering wildly. Everybody was happy. I began speaking very strongly, powerfully and happily. Because I was discussing the great job my administration did on immigration at the southern border. We were very proud of it.
Trump’s speaking style was indeed different – softer, slower, abandoning his carnival barker patter for the tone of a bedtime story. Reporters, following the assumption of a “transformed” Trump they brought into the event, began to write accounts of the softer statesman who had emerged from his brush with death.
But then he began to riff, first occasionally, then in ever-growing chunks of verbal diarrhea. All the familiar tropes from his stump speeches returned. He claimed the election was stolen, lavished praise on dictators, riffed about things he had seen on television (“I watched the other day on a show called ‘Deface the Nation’ …).
The actual remarks as delivered topped 12,000 words, or four times the prepared text. Trump’s 2024 acceptance speech was the longest in recorded history, topping the next two entries (Donald Trump 2016, Donald Trump 2020, respectively). The result was paradoxically incendiary yet dull. The crowd’s response was, by the standards of a convention acceptance speech, shockingly sedate.
A convention speech can only matter so much. But Trump blew his speech as badly as he possibly could have. Conventions have become television commercials. The networks devote one hour per night to giving the two major parties an hour on unmediated message delivery, usually resulting in at least a small bump in approval.
Since both parties get the opportunity, they usually cancel each other out, more or less. But the event is the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars in free advertising, one the parties traditionally script for maximum effect.
Trump’s speech did not even begin until after 10:30, halfway through the golden network-television window. (The first half-hour was a combination of musical performances, an empty stage, and a short address by Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White.)
The news media, perhaps accepting his election as a given and hoping for the best, was prepared to take his “transformation” at face value. Merely performing a semblance of normality would have earned Trump an extraordinary wave of positive news coverage.
The wave of new-Trump leaks before the speech no doubt reflected his advisers’ desperation to show Trump what the media would give him if he followed their advice for once. This is a familiar pattern in Trump’s political career, in which his advisers use the media to cajole him into accepting their suggestions, inevitably to be let down.
History has given us examples of megalomaniacal leaders surviving assassination attempts. (It’s one of the hazards of the job.) The experience does not generally make them cuddly and warm.
The actual change wrought by the assassin’s bullet is that Trump now believes he can turn questions about his own authoritarian tendencies into an attack on his opponent for being uncivil. (Axios: “One close adviser, explaining the new convention plans, said Trump’s gambit is that now Democrats ‘can’t come after me anymore as a fascist. What’re they gonna do now?’”)
Cooperating with that cynical tactic is a choice. But imagining Trump’s actual character has changed is a fantasy even the most willing enablers can hardly sustain now. A bullet wound is not a cure for sociopathy.