Well, that didn’t last long.

Our former president nearly lost his life when a bullet shard of glass grazed his ear. Which isn’t to minimize the very real assassination attempt that cost one man his life and put two others into the hospital. Fortunately, the assassin’s target survived with minimal injuries. Afterwards, Donald J. Trump declared himself a changed man.

Speaking to the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito the day after, Trump declared himself touched by God. “Everything changed in that moment,” Zito quoted Trump as saying in an interview with CNN’s Abby Phillip. “For the country and for himself.”

Zito told Phillip that Trump was now going to focus on “bringing the country back together. He thought it was very, very important. In that moment, when that happened to him, he understood this was what he was supposed to do… what he was meant to do.”

That sounded to my ears very much like a man humbled, and I welcomed that new humility.

At first, it appeared as though Trump really had changed. He seemed subdued during the first few nights of the RNC, although perhaps his lethargy came from the fact that he had a pillow taped to his head. Regardless, even I could see what MSNBC’s Katy Tur described to Chuck Todd:

“Chuck, last night looking at Donald Trump, I know we’ve been talking about this, but I think it bears having another conversation. I’ve never seen him with that look on his face. I’ve never seen him walk into a room and look overwhelmed in that way. It also seemed emotional. Can we honestly ask whether a brush with death has changed him?”

Yes, Katy, we can ask. And then he opened his mouth and gave us the answer.

All eyes were on the former president as he delivered, for the third time, his presidential nomination acceptance speech. Would this time be different? For years now, we’ve been hearing about Trump’s “new tone,” which........

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