Home Update: Trump seemed to be moderating, but nope, he was just playing politics
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Update: Trump seemed to be moderating, but nope, he was just playing politics

Chris Graham

trump as usual Update: Monday, 11:12 a.m. Man, not only did this column not age well, it didn’t make it 10 minutes before the bread turned moldy.

The time-stamp on this column is 10:34 a.m. Seven minutes later, at 10:41 a.m., Donald Trump did a victory lap on Truth Social after a Florida federal judge that he appointed threw out the classified-docs case against him on the flimsiest of legal reasoning.

“As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts – The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!”

OK, so, we have our answer to the question asked in the column that follows – was the moderating that we saw for a few hours after Saturday’s assassination attempt authentic, or was it an attempt at playing politics?

Trump is using “Uniting our Nation” to take the heat off.

I had written, in a column on Sunday, that the over/under for this Sept. 12, 2001, moment was Thursday’s RNC campaign speech.

If you took the under, you win the pony.


Original column: Monday, 10:34 a.m. Donald Trump’s brush with death on Saturday seems to be moderating his approach, though we’ll have to wait and see if it’s authentic or just an attempt at smart politics.

Taking his words on the face, the ex-president told The Washington Examiner and The New York Post in separate interviews on Sunday that he is going to give “a whole different speech now” when he takes the stage at the Republican National Convention on Thursday.

“I had all prepared an extremely tough speech, really good, all about the corrupt, horrible administration, but I threw it away,” Trump said.

“I think it would be very bad if I got up and started going wild about how horrible everybody is, and how corrupt and crooked, even if it’s true,” Trump said.

“I want to try to unite our country, but I don’t know if that’s possible. People are very divided,” Trump said.

From his telling, this new ground, a seismic shift, considering the source, is “reality setting in” from his near-death experience at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

“I rarely look away from the crowd,” Trump said, recalling how he had just looked up and to his right precisely at the moment that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, had begun firing in his direction.

It’s pretty clear that had Trump not shifted his head mere millimeters at that exact moment, the bullet that ended up grazing his right ear would have hit him in the back of the head, almost certainly killing him instantly.

“Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?” Trump said.

This is a rare moment of humanity from Trump, known for bombast dating back to the newspaper ad that he took out in the 1980s calling for the execution of five black teenagers accused of rape, since exonerated, his 2015 campaign announcement in which he said Mexico was sending “rapists” across the border, the 2016 campaign-rally calls to “lock her up” aimed at rival Hillary Clinton, the 2017 Charlottesville “both sides” justification of Nazis and white supremacists.

I’m leaving a lot out there.

Online trolls have practically burned down the interwebs since the assassination attempt with vitriol aimed at Democrats and progressives, many outright blaming them for the attempt, even as it has emerged that Crooks was a registered Republican described by his former high-school classmates as a loner who regularly wore hunting gear to school, so, no, he wasn’t a Democrat or a progressive.

And it’s not just been the usual anonymous folks on the web. Two senators said to be on the short list for the second spot on the Republican presidential ticket, JD Vance and Tim Scott, have taken direct aim at Democrats in the aftermath of the shooting.

From what we’re being led to believe now, they did that more of their own volition than at any direction from TrumpWorld.

Axios reported that Trump has “ordered aides not to allow the convention’s prime-time speakers to update their remarks to dial up outrage over the shooting,” and Trump media whisperer Maggie Haberman noted in a CNN panel discussion that the Trump campaign has not tried to make money off assassination-themed merchandise, “whereas when he was indicted or when he was convicted, that happened almost immediately.”

Is this just smart politics, aimed at rallying sympathetic support among independents and disaffected Never Trump Republicans, or was the shooting a genuine come-to-Jesus moment for Trump, who, let’s be honest about this, has never had any reason to have to face even the slightest of adversities, much less anything resembling mortality?

I want to continue to be cynical about anything involving Trump, but you have to concede that the easier approach would have been for him to play the shooting as an us-against-them kind of thing, the way he’s played everything else for the past nine years.

So, when he says, as he did in the newspaper interviews over the weekend, “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance,” yeah, I’m already thinking that I’m going to regret later having written this, but I’m going to say here, I want to believe this is authentic.

Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham, the king of "fringe media," a zero-time Virginia Sportswriter of the Year, and a member of zero Halls of Fame, is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].