Trump: Impulse to be 'changed' man overwhelmed by criminal cases filed against him
Donald Trump a changed, nice man? Nope, so said Donald Trump himself.
"When I got hit, everybody thought I was going to be a nice guy, and they thought I'd change," Trump said at a rally July 31 in Pennsylvania. "They all said Trump is going to be a nice man now. He came close to death. And I really agreed with that — for about eight hours or so."
Trump was referring to a narrative that was often-repeated during last month's Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Among those making that argument was former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who said he believed the near-death experience at the hands of an assailant firing at him with an assault weapon had transformed the former president.
"I have to say, I think it changed him," said Carlson.
Trump's second-eldest son, Eric, said much the same at a breakfast hosted by the Florida delegation at the convention in Milwaukee on July 16. He said he saw "humbleness" and a "new persona" in his father in the days after an attempt on his life that had left him bloodied but defiantly unbowed.
"When you walked out last night and you can just see almost a humbleness in him, just a changed persona realizing how close that ultimately was," Eric Trump said that morning in reference to seeing his father walk into the convention hall the previous evening.
Trump mused that 'nice man' feeling actually lasted only a few hours
In this week's rally speech in Harrisburg, Donald Trump said he did feel more magnanimous after being shot until he remembered how he said he has been persecuted. The former president said he "realized they were trying to put me in prison" and then lashed out again at Democrats, "radical left" prosecutors and "crooked judges."
"I said, 'You know, these are bad people.' So I was nice for about … three, four, five hours," he continued. "And then I said, 'These are bad people. We have to win this battle.' And you know what, they're going to become nicer when we win. But we're going to have to win, I believe, to make them reasonable, because they are crazy."
Trump's admission that his post-assassination attempt conversion was fleeting came in a speech in which he alleged Vice President Kamala Harris, his expected Democratic opponent in the Nov. 5 election, is "fake, fake, fake."
Trump claimed Harris is employing "Houdini" political tricks to avoid having to defend her record as the Biden administration's "border czar" as well backing away from her "defund the police" rhetoric, all to "change her image."
"Everything about Kamala Harris rollout is phony and it's fake," he said.
Earlier Wednesday, Trump insulted Harris by falsely saying Harris had flip-flopped in portraying her ethnic and racial background in the past.
Harris has Indian and Jamaican-born parents and attended Howard University, a historically Black university where she joined the predominantly black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She became a member of the Congressional Black Caucus after entering the Senate in 2017.
Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump says post-assassination 'changed' man conversion lasted 8 hours
