Talk about unity, but not to Marjorie Taylor Greene

All of a sudden, unity. For a minute, anyway.

President Joe Biden called for the country to “unite as one nation” in his address to the nation Sunday night in response to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump Saturday in Pennsylvania. Moments later, Trump posted on Truth Circle the words “UNITE, AMERICA!”

Trump told the New York Post and the Washington Examiner he’d thrown out what was going to be an “extremely tough” convention speech and was preparing a new speech which he sees as a chance to bring the country, and maybe even the world, together.

“I want to unite our country, but I don’t know if it’s possible. People are very divided,” he said.

This probably means the Trump campaign believes the foiled assassination attempt has put an even bigger election victory than expected within its grasp. Trump’s abrupt rejection of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the changes in the abortion plank of the Republican Party’s new platform were signs there was already worry about the campaign’s sharper edges. 

The convention in Milwaukee could be seen as an attempt to ease into something closer to a 50-state strategy, whatever that might look like in the 21st Century.

The memo about this change in tone seems not to have reached U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“The Democrats are the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars…. The Democrat Party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump,” the Georgia congresswoman wrote on social media Sunday. Trump’s speech will have to be a doozy to turn those sentiments into unity.

As for the Democrats themselves, any faint hope they’ll be singing in the unity chorus for long was dashed on Monday when federal Judge Aileen Cannon threw out the federal indictment against Trump in the classified documents case. If there was still a Democrat who didn’t believe Cannon was in the tank for the ex-president, this ruling should be the final straw.

Trump’s call for unity does seem to have resonated at the party level. His primary rival, Nikki Haley, has decided she will make an appearance at this week’s convention after all. If that leads to more Haley primary voters returning to the fold in November, it could be one of the biggest developments of the week.

The killer who shook the nation enough to generate all this unity talk remains a cipher but a familiar one: the kid who sat by himself in the lunchroom and didn’t make the high school rifle team. The high school graduate who won a $500 math and science award but ended up working in the kitchen of a nursing home after graduating from community college.

The emerging profile of Thomas Matthew Crooks remains a blank slate as to his politics, and there is a good chance this will stay that way. The t-shirt he was wearing Saturday was for neither party but for a YouTube channel for gun lovers called Demolition Ranch.

History doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but there have now been two unsuccessful assassination attempts on former presidents running for a second nonconsecutive term, featuring bravura performances by the targets.

The first was in 1912 when former President Theodore Roosevelt was shot while making a speech in Milwaukee. Having failed to win another Republican nomination after four years out of office, he was running as the Progressive or Bull Moose Party candidate.

The bullet, fired by a saloon keeper who later claimed William McKinley had directed him to do the deed in a dream, passed through a metal case and a folded speech copy in Roosevelt’s coat pocket before it lodged in his chest. Declaring that “it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose,” Roosevelt insisted on finishing his speech before being taken to a hospital.

Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? Roosevelt lost that year’s election, by the way, to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.