It took former President Donald Trump less than a week to abandon the faux unity message his managers put on his teleprompter at the Republican National Convention and revert to his unusual disrespectful, denigrating self.
“They say, ‘Sir, be nice. You just got hit with a bullet. Maybe he’s changed. Be nice,’ and I’d love to be nice,” the former president told a post-convention North Carolina rally.
“But I’m dealing against real garbage when you hear that,” he added, deriding his new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, with pejoratives like “radical left lunatic” and “stupid.” “No, I haven’t changed,” he declared three days later in Minnesota. “Maybe I’ve gotten worse. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day.”
And though Trump initially declared his willingness to debate Harris “more than once,” he quickly abandoned that commitment too, noting Harris is not yet the official Democratic nominee, not that President Joe Biden was when they clashed June 27. But he acknowledged Monday he’d “probably” debate her.
But who’s surprised?