Donald Trump is a changed man. We know because he has said so.

He has framed his near-death experience at the Pennsylvania rally at which a sniper tried to assassinate him in spiritual terms. He has said,”God alone…prevented the unthinkable from happening.” A chorus of MAGA supporters have joined in the opinion that “God protected Trump.” Trump has said that a doctor who was treating his wounded ear said, as so many people do with Trump, “he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle.”

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that God apparently did not care so much for the life of the spectator killed at the Trump rally…or for that matter the dead in Uvalde, or at the Tree of Life Synagogue, or at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, or at Sandy Hook, or at Parkland High. Who are we to judge how Trump was affected by the experience? Let’s take him at his word and see whether he behaves any differently.

He has told reporters that in the wake of the shooting, he has torn up the barn-burner of a speech he intended to give at the Republican national convention and that he wants to take a different tone. You know, something like that in the deeply weird letter to America allegedly written by Melania Trump in the wake of the shooting, the one in which she both said the shooter “recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine” and in which she—or ChatGPT—wrote “Dawn is here again. Let us unite. Now.”

About his speech, Trump, showing his new softer side said, “I had all prepared an extremely tough speech, really good, all about the corrupt, horrible administration.” Then he added, “But I threw it away.” He then said, “I want to unite our country.” Which is an idea that held up during his conversation with with New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin all the way until when asked about how he would change his tone that policy differences were, in Goodwin’s words, “the stumbling block.”

But has he changed? As soon as the dismissal of the classified documents case was announced Monday, Trump took to Truth Social to call for the dismissal of all the other charges and cases he faces, overseen by a “Democrat Justice Department.”

Just preceding this, others reporting on the alleged transformation of Trump and........

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