Despite President Biden’s calls for ending divi siveness in America, inflammatory rhetoric is in Donald Trump’s political DNA. STOCK PHOTOS

People react differently when they are reminded of their mortality. For Donald Trump, it appears that his escape from an assassin at his late afternoon rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday was an epiphany.

Interviewed by The Washington Examiner the next day, the former president announced that he had intended to continue his relentless attacks on President Joe Biden and Democrats generally but, instead, will call for unity when he addresses the Republican National Convention.

“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” Trump said. “Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches. Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”

Trump acknowledged that the assassin missed killing him because he turned his head to point to illegal immigration data at a screen. “That reality is just setting in,” he said. “I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?”

He added, “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance.”

But Trump posted on Truth Social that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”

Divine intervention was quickly embraced by Trump’s followers. Miami Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar posted a drawing of “an angel steering Trump away from the bullet,” Politico reported. But they blamed Biden and other Democrats for the attempt on their leader’s life through reckless rhetoric, an indication that ending divisiveness is not high on their agenda.

In any case, inflammatory rhetoric is in Trump’s political DNA. Two weeks before the Iowa caucus for the 2016 election, he claimed at a campaign stop, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue [New York] and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s like, incredible.”

Trump described the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, sponsored by racist rightwing groups, in which one person was killed, as an event in which there were “good people on both sides.”

He describes the thousands of his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “patriots” and he will consider pardoning some of them if he wins the presidential election.

In a Veterans Day speech last year in Claremont, New Hampshire, he declared, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.” He claimed that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

The trend goes back further, to 2011, when Trump outraged Democrats by reviving a falsehood that Barack Obama was born in Africa, not Hawaii and was ineligible to be president. That “birther” allegation had first been made in 2004 by Illinois political candidate Andy Martin, Politico reported. Coming from Trump, it gained wide currency, as did another falsehood about Obama: that he was a secret Muslim.

By then the so-called Tea Party movement had been gaining traction and Obama and his wife Michelle were being vilified in the most racist manner. However, that was then. Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a wounded war hero who was tortured by North Vietnam forces, shut down a woman who said that she did not trust Obama and that he was an "Arab."

McCain responded, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man and citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

That was a time of civility and commitment to facts. But the picture of what Vermont’s Independent Sen.Bernie Sanders would call “boring” politics was already changing, thanks to a politician whom the headline in an Atlantic magazine story called “The Man Who Broke Politics”: Newt Gingrich.

McKay Coppins, who wrote the story, told NPR’s “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross in a 2018 interview that few others had done more than Gingrich “to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise.” The similarities between their two styles is so great that it is evident that Trump is not only using the playbook which Gingrich used to end the decades-long control which Democrats held over the U.S. House but has also refined it, adding his special touch as a former reality TV star.

Gingrich “gained power … very deliberately and methodically by undermining the institution of Congress itself from within by kind of blowing up the bipartisan coalitions that had existed for a long time in Washington and then using the kind of populist anger at the gridlock in Congress to then take power,” Coppins wrote. He recruited young conservatives to run for Congress who were “meaner and more aggressive and more combative and more confrontational.” They would be “kind of bomb-throwers by nature.”

Gingrich called his chosen few the Conservative Opportunity Society. They would “stalk Capitol Hill looking for ways to make trouble” and work “to kind of upend the old dynamics of comity and decorum and to kind of shred a lot of the traditions that had stabilized Congress in the middle of the century and heading into the late 20th century.” Trump would soon have his Make America Great Again (MAGA).

Gingrich told his people to use certain words to describe Democrats, Coppins wrote, such as “sick, pathetic, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical and corrupt.” He told them that political contests were ‘big struggles between good and evil’ and ‘a battle for the character and soul of America.’”

Gingrich also resorted, according to Coppins, to “giving political opponents catchy, alliterative nicknames,” such as calling former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis “Daffy Dukakis” and Democrats as the “Loony Left.” Trump has adopted that tactic also, such as calling the president “Crooked Biden.”

Gingrich also came up with a “Contract With America,” his blueprint that was successful in defeating Democrats. And, even though he professes ignorance about it, Trump will have his Project 2025 which is vastly more radical.

Gingrich, who was an adviser to Trump for years, met with little opposition. For instance, despite the despicable attacks against him and his wife, Obama refused to engage in confrontational politics. Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention in 2016, “When they go low, we go high.”

Not anymore.

“The choice in this election is simple. Donald Trump will destroy our democracy. I will defend it,” Biden said in June. In a TV ad prior to the assassination attempt, he declared that his rival had “already led an insurrection and threatened to be a dictator on day one. Donald Trump can never hold this office again.”

After the assassination attempt, Biden, in an Oval Office address, called on the nation to reject political violence and for political leaders to “cool it down.” He also acknowledged that he made a “mistake” when he told campaign donors that he wanted to put a “bull’s eye” on Trump, the Associated Press reported. “We cannot, we must not go down this road in America,” he said about the shooting. “We’ve traveled it before throughout our history. Violence has never been the answer.”

Still, while addressing the recent NAACP convention in Las Vegas, Biden declared, “Just because we must lower the temperature in our politics as it relates to violence doesn’t mean we should stop telling the truth.”

It probably did take divine intervention to save Trump. It would have to happen again for incendiary language to disappear from the campaign trail between now and the Nov. 5 election and from American politics.

Writing in Politico, Michael Schaffer remarked the day after the shooting that Americans should have “a feeling of deep sadness for the country. In the span of a generation, this democracy of ours has become a place where the language of political violence is commonplace and acts of it are not far behind.”

And that is a great pity.