Keller: Is the kinder, gentler Donald Trump just a one-night stand?
The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
BOSTON - A solid majority of Americans have never liked former President Donald Trump.
During his four years in office, Trump had the lowest average approval of any president since Gallup began polling in the 1940s. He left the White House with a pitiful 34% approval rating. These days, he struggles to win more than a 40% favorability score.
That Trump appears to have the upper hand in the 2024 race is a tribute as much - if not more - to the weakness of his current opponent than to his own appeal. So his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was a crucial moment for Trump, not just his last chance to command the sole focus of a national TV audience, but one with, in theory, a built-in sympathy factor stemming from the horrendous attempt on his life last weekend.
Trump speech
Trump said at the start of the week that he had discarded the "humdinger" of a speech that was planned and instead of an effort to excite his base would be seizing the "chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world together."
That didn't happen.
But for the target audience - that small but crucial pool of undecided or wavering voters who likely hold the outcome in their hands - the speech served a crucial political purpose: disrupting, at least temporarily, the negative impressions of Trump that have fueled his unpopularity.
Instead of loud, clownish shouting, the speech was delivered in a normal, at-times emotional tone of voice. The backdrop of the assassination attempt demanded a more serious affect than Trump often adopts, and his presentation mostly met the moment.
The hard edge of grievance interrupted when Trump referenced his legal problems, and his handlers must have been tense when he started ad-libbing shout-outs to family and cronies, citing all the subpoenas his sons have fielded and referring to "crazy Nancy Pelosi." But he largely stuck to a script that substituted warm milk for the boilermakers Trump normally serves up.
"The discord and division in our society must be healed. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart," Trump said. "I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America."
That could have been an excerpt from then-Sen. Barack Obama's famous "red states and blue states" keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. It helped propel Obama to electoral success.
Trump branding tweak
Will it do the same for Trump? Hard to say without knowing if the relatively "kinder gentler" Trump rhetoric was anything more than a one-night stand, let alone without knowing for sure who he'll be running against.
But let's put it this way: a well-designed branding tweak coming amid a wave of post-shooting goodwill ought to produce a nice polling bounce for Trump. If it doesn't, or if it comes and goes quickly, it may be that voter distaste for him is too deeply entrenched to dislodge.
