The humanization of Trump: Voters saw something different this time around

Roasts are not usually vehicles for deep introspection, but during his remarks at this year’s Al Smith dinner on Oct. 17, Donald Trump’s lips issued something that sounded suspiciously like an apology. It concerned his own joke that he judged had gone too far, about Democratic opponent Kamala Harris’s child care plan.

“The only piece of advice I would have for her in the event that she wins would be not to let her husband Doug anywhere near the nannies,” Trump told the crowd at the $5,000-a-plate Catholic charities fundraiser at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. “Just keep them away.”

The joke concerned would-be first husband Doug Emhoff, whose union with Harris is his second marriage after his first marriage ended in divorce. One cause of the split was Emhoff’s reported infidelity with the family nanny, resulting in a pregnancy and likely an abortion.

After delivering those barbed lines, Trump stopped himself and did something completely unexpected. “That’s a nasty one,” Trump admitted. “That’s nasty. I told these idiots that gave me this stuff, that’s too tough.”

That could have been a ruse, of course, a way of introducing an issue but washing one’s hands at the same time, except for what followed. Trump talked about his routine at that same event in 2016, when he ran successfully against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He judged his past self to have been a mean and uncaring person.

“See, I was told it’s a roast, and I had the meanest guy you’ve ever seen write stuff up, and, man, was the room angry,” Trump said. “It was, like, terrible, and I knew I was in trouble around midway through because, you know, people had not … even my own son was angry at me. They were saying it’s too much, but I did it anyway. I didn’t give a damn.”

Trump then found a way to give Harris a compliment that he twisted into the lightest possible roast of a punchline.

“Campaigning can take a toll on a family and family life, although I hear that Kamala and her husband carve out some really beautiful alone time at the end of the day for an intimate dinner,” he said. “Just Doug, her, and the teleprompter that she uses quite well.”

The whole address contained many of Trump’s standard digs. It also showed a glimmer of something else that many voters saw and connected with during his successful attempt to retake the White House after so bitterly losing it to Joe Biden in 2020.

Just look at what Trump conceded in those few words: Harris might, conceivably, win this thing; her marriage was something worthy of respect and not scorn; and he had gone all-in on his pursuit of power the first time around, ignoring propriety, even shoving wise familial counsel aside.

Indeed, he “didn’t give a damn” back then. The unspoken implication was that he had started to give a damn at some point, and this newfound perspective would redound to his country’s great benefit if people would only give him another lease on the White House.

Mr. Unpopular’s progress

Coming into this year’s election, Trump was viewed by a majority of people in a persistent and quantifiable negative light. Many Republican officials feared a blowout should he get the nomination for a third time.

Yes, Biden was vulnerable to charges of age and economic mismanagement and much more besides. But Trump was dogged by lawsuits and court appearances over political unrest, his business dealings, and his history of womanizing.

Trump had money problems and appeared to have lost the Midas touch politically. Not only did he lose the 2020 presidential election and refuse to concede to the point of riots, but he was also widely believed to have cost his own party control of the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections because of fallout from those riots and because of his questionable endorsements.

Trump’s averaged unfavorable ratings reached their peak in April 2016 at 64.5%, spiked near that in January 2021 at 59.5%, and jumped again to 57.9% in January 2023, according to RealClearPolitics.

At no point in the history of his presidential polling has Trump ever enjoyed a net positive rating, but he did make significant progress. Near the end of October this year, his negatives had dipped to a 51.5% unfavorable rating, or almost within the margin of error.

Americans talk Trump comeback

The answer to “What happened?” may not simply be that he got shot in the head, though that’s a large part of the story. In July, when a sniper grazed his ear at a rally in rural Pennsylvania, Trump’s disapproval reached a peak of 56.8%. Over the next three months, it continued to fall and fall. Why?

The Washington Examiner asked almost two dozen geographically and ideologically diverse Americans when they first suspected that Trump would win. “When the shooter missed,” was Mario Muhlach of Louisiana’s unflinching explanation. Scott Edwards of Wyoming elaborated and added some color.

“Are you kidding?” Edwards said. “He was shot and then got up and raised his fist and yelled, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ Biden said his voters were garbage, and Trump showed up in a garbage truck. [Harris] lied that she worked at McDonald’s, and then Trump worked at one. He still would have won, but this is why he did. He loves America and Americans while both establishment Republicans and Democrats don’t.”

Chris Burlingame was a Harris supporter and still has something like post-traumatic stress disorder from the first Trump presidency. “Every morning for four years, it seemed like I was waking up wondering if the president was going to get us into a war with a country like Belgium or if he was going to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to call Bette Midler ugly,” he told the Washington Examiner.

While Burlingame was rooting for a Harris victory, he noticed that she was not connecting with voters who would decide the election. Her campaign seemed more concerned with “orchestrating viral moments than speaking to undecided voters in the Midwest,” he said.

As the campaign unfolded, others noticed Harris was not connecting where it mattered. Doug Gibson of Utah thought Trump probably had the edge “when I noticed no bounce resulted from the Democratic convention,” he told the Washington Examiner.

“Throughout September and October, I had nagging suspicions about Kamala Harris’s chances of winning, although I very much hoped she would,” said Maria Simpson, a Democratic strategist from Virginia. After Harris’s loss, she suspects that “the only way the United States will ever elect a female candidate [for president] is if both parties nominate a woman in the same cycle” — say Ivanka Trump versus Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

But the story of Harris’s failure to connect was also about Trump’s increased success at selling himself to the larger mass of voters and not simply the Republican faithful. “When Trump went on Rogan and Kamala went on SNL” in the last weeks of the campaign, Danny Ferbert of Missouri was pretty sure her goose was cooked.

A kinder, humbler Trump?

Trump’s surprising behavior helped. When he and Biden had clashed in debates in 2020, both men angrily interrupted again and again. For that reason, the microphone could be cut off by the moderators during their one debate in late June. Yet Trump, for the most part, didn’t try to get the last word this time.

Biden showed his age and his decline. His answers frequently drifted off into incoherence. And Trump, only a few years younger than Biden, showed a certain amount of restraint. Four years appeared to have mellowed him some.

Weeks later, in the middle of Biden’s implosion, Trump was shot at and grazed. It was the first of at least three attempts on his life during the campaign. This led to the iconic moment when Trump, bloodied but unbowed and fist-pumping, bade his supporters to fight on. It was also the start of something unexpected.

Trump tore up the text of his address to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and made some efforts to change the tone in the new, extra-long version. It called for national unity to work toward a “new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed.”

At the convention in late July, Trump showcased his large family, including third wife Melania, adult children of different marriages, their spouses, and grandchildren. Trump is a germaphobe and famously averse to public displays of affection, but he kissed Melania, held her hand, and hugged a grandson onstage.

The once and future president, bandage still covering his hurt ear, retold the story of the assassination attempt with some measure of humility. He said the bullet would have connected had his head not turned at the last second and then resisted turning further, chalking this up to “the grace of Almighty God” and a “providential moment, probably.”

Trump thanked the Secret Service agents who sprang to his aid. He praised the crowd for not panicking and helping to spot the sniper so that a Secret Service shooter could target and return fire. He called out by name two members of the Pennsylvania audience who had been hurt in the attack and memorialized Corey Comperatore, who was killed sheltering family members.

Comperatore had been a volunteer firefighter. Members of his company sent Trump one of his helmets. Trump had it displayed onstage during his address, approached it, and kissed it as well.

Trump had shown some capacity for ingratiating behavior over the years, but on his terms. He could praise others when it suited but rarely held back from praising himself. He was almost never humble or self-critical, even when feints in that direction might have helped him. What had changed in him?

Trump awakens, voters roar

Psychologists have made a study of what are called brush-with-death experiences and how they can change people. These are not near-death experiences, with clinical death, lights, tunnels, and other visions of the afterlife. Rather, these are times when death got too close for comfort. A bullet grazing one’s head would be a textbook case.

“Think of anyone you might know who has had a life-threatening episode — maybe someone who has wrestled with an ominous diagnosis or survived a car crash where the doctor marveled, ‘Whoa … if the damage had just been half an inch to the right …’ Have you noticed how purposeful these people are after emerging from what the psychologists have called ‘the roar of awakening’?” Jodi Wellman writes in her new book You Only Die Once.

Wellman is very much a fan of this phenomenon, which maps onto Trump’s recent experience. “Studies consistently show how these people wake up to their lives with fresh eyes — with clarified priorities and profound attitude adjustments about the ways they want to live ‘from this day forward,’” she explains.

Some of the benefits of brush-with-death experiences can include “reshuffled priorities,” “elevated gratitude,” “freedom from expectations,” and even “spiritual awakening,” she writes.

Observers stress there are downsides, too. Some people feel more aloof after coming close to death. And, unless nurtured, the effects can wear off in the shuffle of life. Still, for a time, a brush with death can make a presidential candidate, say, into a more joyful, less self-involved person.

That’s what many voters saw in the homestretch of Trump’s final run for the White House. He was enjoying himself, doing goofy things such as serving fries at McDonald’s and driving a Trump-Vance campaign-branded garbage truck.

He was also doing unexpected things, such as kissing a fallen fireman’s helmet, apologizing for a nasty joke, and turning down a second debate with Harris after she cleanly beat him in their one matchup.

The amount of time and money that had been spent vilifying Trump since he descended the escalator to launch his first Republican presidential campaign was immense and likely incalculable. A single article in the Atlantic by a popular historian likened the man to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.

Voters were supposed to view him as a monster and either run away or charge with ballots drawn. Yet that is not what happened. Trump didn’t just win. According to the current mishmash of exit polls, he did historically well with many minority and first-time voters. Recent events and Trump’s responses to them humanized the man and injected some enthusiasm into the GOP get-out-the-vote efforts.

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Patrick Hynes is a Republican PR man in New Hampshire. He didn’t think Trump would pull it out, but that did not deter him from showing up and bringing friends.

“I certainly voted for him and was honored to bring my 18-year-old daughter for the first time in order to vote for him as well,” Hynes told the Washington Examiner. “But I forgot to listen to the regular, normal people in my life, all of whom were enthusiastic for Trump.”

Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.