A New Donald Trump -- Or the Same Old Divisive Donald Trump?

Donald Is the Greatest -- Just ask him.

If you listened to Donald Trump’s entire one hour and 32 minute rambling speech at the GOP convention, if you actually sat through the whole thing which was filled with the usual exaggerations, misstatements and downright lies, you have my condolences.

If you actually believed him when he hinted that there was a new Donald Trump, one born out of his near death experience in Butler, Pennsylvania, you’d have a tough time believing it now — because if his convention speech proved anything, it’s that the new Donald Trump is the same as the old Donald Trump.

The speech started out with Trump speaking in a somber tone, one not usually associated with him. He explained what happened to him as the bullet grazed his ear and came within an inch of burrowing into his head. And, yes, he did sound like a new Donald Trump when he said that, “The discord and division in our society must be healed — we must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together — or we fall apart.”

Then came the rest of the speech. He called former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “Crazy Nancy.” He said America is a “nation in decline.” He called the immigration crisis along our southern border “the greatest invasion in history.”

And in his typical way, he gave egomania a bad name, telling his audience that, “I can end wars with one phone call,” and free U.S. hostages. Of course, he didn’t say how he would do all that and his supporters inside the convention hall didn’t seem to care. Messiahs, they must figure, are capable of performing miracles.

And he didn’t miss the opportunity to tell anyone listening that, “In fact, I am the one saving democracy for the people of the country.”

It was a good line — as long as you put aside his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the nation’s Capitol.

But he did miss the opportunity to seal the deal and virtually wrap up the election. His speech was red meat to an audience that doesn’t need convincing. They’ll walk over broken glass to vote for him in November.

If he had said not only that the political rhetoric is too hot in this country but that he, Donald Trump, has contributed to the divisions tearing America apart … if he did something he seems incapable of doing and apologized for his role in cheapening the national conversation … the election would have been his. He might win anyway, but self-inspection on that big stage would have been the clincher, I think. Talk like that appeals to moderate voters.

It’s those moderate voters in crucial swing states that he could have convinced that he’s not the Donald Trump they rejected in 2020, but someone they could — if not actually embrace — at least vote for this time around, given their serious doubts about Joe Biden’s mental and physical ability to serve four more years.

“As long as our energies are spent fighting each other, our destiny will remain out of reach, and that’s not acceptable,” he said in one of the more uplifting moments of his long, meandering speech. “We must instead take that energy and use it to realize our country’s true potential — and write our own thrilling chapter of the American story.”

The question now is which Donald Trump voters will remember after his speech — the new Donald who says we need to come together as a nation — or the same old divisive Donald.

As for Joe Biden, it’s feeling a lot like August 1974. That’s when Barry Goldwater and the GOP leaders in the House and Senate went to the White House to tell Richard Nixon that he lost virtually everyone’s support in Congress and that the end was near.

Nixon resigned one day later.

As I write this, Biden’s team says he’s in it to stay, that he won’t drop out. But these are the same campaign people who have been telling us to believe them and not what we have been witnessing with our own eyes. For months, they told us that he was in top physical and mental shape and that Biden’s disastrous debate performance was nothing more than a bad night.

So why should we believe them now that they’re saying he’s won’t abandon the race? Donald Trump, after all, isn’t the only one in the political arena with a credibility problem.