At his core, the former president appears to remain unchanged.

An acceptance speech is always an act of theater. But Donald Trump’s tone Thursday night was not his usual performance. He sounded like a penitent, a man who had just barely escaped death by inches and knew it.

“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump said. His face wasn’t smirking, or smiling, as it so often is. The crowd in Milwaukee was chanting and hollering, but Trump’s voice was down several octaves from his familiar braggadocio.

He was preceded by a ritual of hype that featured Kid Rock rapping for the crowd to say “Fight, fight!” and “Trump, Trump!” and calling the former president “the most patriotic badass on Earth.” And then Dana White, huckster and chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, touted Trump as “the toughest, most resilient human being that I’ve ever met in my life.” He could have been introducing UFC superstars Quinton “Rampage” Jackson or Georges St-Pierre.

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But Trump didn’t strut onstage. He wasn’t wrapped in a Superman cape. He talked more softly than I can remember in a major speech. And unimaginably, for me, in the opening portions of the speech, he talked about unity and healing. Even at the end, after he reverted more to type, he said, “With great humility, I am asking you to be excited about the future of our country.” Humility? Can Trump really have used that word about himself?

“We live in a world of miracles,” he said. “Every single moment we have on Earth is a gift from God.” Amen to that. And Trump had definitely earned the right to speak of being spared from tragedy.

But did we believe what he had to say? “The discord and division in our society must be healed,” he said. “We rise together or we fall together.” America couldn’t hope for a clearer statement of our present crisis. But is it really believable that the great divider is now a conciliator?

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For years, the great Washington Post cartoonist Herblock always drew Richard M. Nixon with a gangster’s beard. But after Nixon won the White House in 1968, Herblock drew a new image, saying that every new president deserved a clean shave.

Does Trump deserve a clean shave? I was willing to imagine that he was a different man until he launched into a denunciation of Democrats for supposedly weaponizing the justice system. “I am the........

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