There's a Russian fable about a scorpion that wants to cross a river and asks a frog to carry him over. The frog is skeptical, because it worries the scorpion will sting it to death. The scorpion replies that if he stings the frog they will both drown. The frog agrees and reluctantly begins to carry the frog across, when - halfway across the river - the scorpion stings the frog. The frogs before it dies looks at the scorpion and asks, Why? The scorpion replies, "It is in my nature."
That fable represents Trump and the credulous national media.
Many in the media have been breathlessly awaiting Trump's "pivot". Execrable commentator Van Jones is famous for various iterations of "this is the day Trump became president" whenever he sticks reasonably close to the text someone else wrote for him. After the shooting attempt, these same hacks breathlessly promised a "new Trump" and I confess to be worried that against all odds, he might stick to some anodyne prepared remarks.
Nope.
Trump's nature is to harp on grievance and revenge. His nature is to play to the crowd. However, he is also very old. Last night's rambling fiasco of a speech should - in a sane world - provide the same impetus for a discussion of Trump's age and mental capacity among the media that Biden's debate fiasco did. In fact, I think the (perhaps) growing consensus among Democrats that Biden needs to drop out is that any "replacement level" Democrat could wipe the floor with a clearly addled and confused Trump.
There was no new kinder Trump. There never will be and any pundit or reporter who suggests that there will be should be summarily fired in the spot.
UPDATE: I meant to add: It's pretty clear why the Trump campaign scheduled his acceptance speech from 10:30-12:00 at night. They aren't angling to win the Pacific Coast; they wanted to limit the amount of people who saw his rambling speech live, and count on bullshit bothsides coverage from the media, based on his prepared remarks rather than his actual speech.
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