Former President Donald Trump took the stage Thursday during the Republican National Convention, and for 26 minutes of his 92-minute-long speech, he spoke of uniting our deeply divided country.
But while some pundits have argued his speech showed he is more subdued and humble in the wake of last week’s failed assassination attempt against him, others aren’t so sure he’s changed at all. And some political scientists and experts on authoritarianism warn Trump could become even more radical after his near-death experience.
“In an age when power politics too often divide us, now is the time to remember that we are all fellow citizens. We are one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” Trump told the RNC crowd as he briefly read messages promoting unity from a teleprompter.
But when he strayed from the teleprompter’s prepared remarks, that message went out the window. Trump reverted to false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, accusations that his political rival, President Joe Biden, has damaged the country more than the 10 worst presidents in history combined, and fearmongering that immigrants are ruining the nation.
A false message of unity
Elizabeth Bennion, chancellor’s professor of political science at Indiana University South Bend, told Business Insider the speakers at the GOP convention seemed to “move back and forth between a message of unity and a message of contrasting ‘real Americans’ who support Donald Trump versus those who are determined to destroy Trump and Trumpism at all costs.”
She pointed to Hulk Hogan, who identified “real Americans” as “Trumpites” during his appearance, and Eric Trump’s suggestion that Democrats seeking to destroy his father by painting him as a threat to democracy as evidence that Trump and his supporters haven’t suddenly become more measured in recent days.
Bennion noted that predicting Trump’s behavior is often impossible because he rarely does or says “what we might expect a president or presidential candidate to do or say based on the behavior of past presidents.”
Still, she said, the assassination attempt appears to have galvanized Trump and his supporters, with his most strident allies raising their fists in defiance and chanting “fight, fight, fight” during the convention — echoing Trump’s actions in the moments after the shooting.
“This is an unprecedented situation in US history,” Bennion said.
Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University and author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century,” says it’s absurd to think Trump would change now.
“His entire political career has been based upon the principle of dividing, bullying, intimidating, and cheating. As was his business career,” Snyder told Business Insider. “The policies he is interested in seem to chiefly involve retribution. I don’t expect that to change. The policies of the oligarchs around him, as expressed in Project 2025, involve hollowing out the government so that they can have their way. Again, I don’t see why that would change.”
Autocrat history lessons
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and expert in authoritarianism, wrote in a recent Substack article that Trump’s call for “unity” following the attempted assassination has deep roots among autocratic leaders — with “unity being understood in the strongman manner as the labeling of any criticism against the leader as dangerous and an incitement to further violence.”
“We can watch carefully the messaging that comes out of the Trump campaign in the next weeks, and realize that, far from becoming more moderate, the strongman always renews his calls for vengeance after threats on his power or his life,” Ben-Ghiat wrote.
Ben-Ghiat added that, on the first anniversary of the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared a new holiday: the “July 15 National Day of Democracy and Unity.” By the second anniversary, she noted, he had been reelected with expanded powers, and since 2018, he has served as both President and Prime Minister.
Repeated attempts on Benito Mussolini’s life, Ben-Ghiat noted, led him to introduce “Laws for the Defense of the State” that created his fascist regime’s repressive infrastructure.
Not everyone is certain Trump will change much in the wake of his assassination attempt — for better or for worse. The chair of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s history department, Michael Green, told BI that he doubts Trump will change at all in response to his near-death experience, in part because of the challenges and consistent risks to his life that he faced while president didn’t change him, either.
“The presidency seems to have left him right where he was, and I think we saw in the speech that he gave to the convention there was some attempt at being more measured, but that kind of introspection is not who he is,” Green said. “And you can love or hate that. Say it’s a character flaw or not. But that said, I don’t see him having changed significantly.”
If the assassination attempt does change Trump, the effects may not be immediately apparent — though they are worth being on the lookout for. “Shock events,” as Ben-Ghiat describes them, serve as an opportunity to give authoritarian leaders the “excuse to do things they’ve wanted to do anyway, like securing their hold on government and silencing the opposition.”
“Assassination attempts are not just psychologically traumatizing for leaders; they often cause lasting health effects,” Ben-Ghiat wrote. “They also accentuate instincts of self-preservation in individuals who are by nature highly suspicious of others and fearful of being betrayed (thus the elevation of loyalty into a governing principle).”
She added: “Such awful experiences can, paradoxically, also strengthen their political power by boosting their personality cults. Surviving an attack can seem to testify to their omnipotence and also lends credibility to the victimhood personas that many strongmen cultivate.”
Snyder told BI that attempting to find a historical analog may be tempting, though he believes it’s probably futile. While the “Christofascist themes” that promoted Trump as a martyr and messiah before the assassination attempt may yet consolidate in the aftermath, Snyder said the former president is unique in his approach to politics and policy, so a comparison rooted in history would be unlikely to help shed light on the future.
“Trump is Trump,” Snyder said.
