Trump Pauses Online Tirade to Preach Unity

Of all the many forms Donald J. Trump can take, maybe the most perplexing one is Pious Trump.

It is a shape he shifted into shortly after 8 o’clock on Thursday morning to deliver a sermon of sorts on Capitol Hill for the annual National Prayer Breakfast. In the grand amphitheater of National Statuary Hall, members of Congress sat before him. There were leaders of the Republican Party, never so in thrall to him as they are now. There were Democrats, never so lost and powerless in their struggle against him as they are now.

“Look at each other,” he urged. He said they were a “great group of people” and beseeched them to come together. “We have to make life better for everyone,” he said.

President Trump, appealing to the better angels?

This was somewhat amazing, since the various other forms of Mr. Trump happened to be running around with flamethrowers earlier that morning, torching the federal bureaucracy, the global order, the media, the opposition party in the room and even the messaging coming out of his own White House.

Just before his arrival at the Capitol to preach unity, he had gone on a fiery posting spree. He demanded that CBS lose its broadcasting license. He trumpeted a baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats had “STOLLEN” billions of dollars from the U.S. Agency for International Development to pay off media outlets for slanted coverage. “DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE,” he wrote. “TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!” In another post a few minutes before that one, he elaborated upon his desire to grab the Gaza Strip, an idea that drew bipartisan condemnation and shocked even his own staff, who tried to clean it up yesterday, evidently to no avail. He described Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, pejoratively as a Palestinian.

This was all difficult to square with the version of Mr. Trump who arrived at the Capitol a little over an hour later and had only warm words to say about Mr. Schumer. “Chuck, thank you very much,” Mr. Trump said as he read out a list of names of lawmakers he believed were present, “thank you.” (In fact, Mr. Schumer had skipped the ceremony to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.)

Mr. Trump excitedly told his audience about his plan for a new national park. There would be a statue garden featuring great Americans throughout history. Some of the people in the room would surely end up there one day as statues themselves, he said. A “wonderfully unifying project” he called it.

He harked back to a time when Congress was a more dignified and chummy place and said he wanted it to be that way again. “Democrats are going to be able to have lunch again, and dinner, with Republicans,” he said. It would be just like it was when he was a kid, he said.

“You know, I revered senators and congressmen,” he said, recalling how his father, Fred Trump, used to go “out to dinner all the time” with an “old congressman” and how nobody much cared about party affiliation. The president wondered if any of the lawmakers had maybe heard of the old congressman. “Sy Halpern, from Queens?” he asked.

Mr. Trump told the story of his near assassination in Butler, Pa., last July, complete with all the miraculous details, by now familiar: The chart of immigration statistics he turned his head to look at as the second the bullet tore across the sky. How he happened to be pointing at it during a different part of his programming than he usually does. He made the joke about his hairdo and how it was mercifully left intact. Everyone laughed, as they always do.

His retelling of that scary tale always arrives at the same three conclusions: God exists. He saved me. I am a changed man.

“Honestly, it changed something in me,” he said as the room began to applaud.

But did it?

There’s little evidence that a new Donald Trump has taken office. He posts dark missives and ideas that rattle his staff at odd hours. He talks about retribution against his foes, shutting down the media and invading allied nations. He cavalierly proposes displacing two million Palestinians to turn their homeland into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

After he left the Capitol, he spoke to a packed ballroom at the Washington Hilton, where the actual breakfast was being held. He reflected again on the attempt on his life and said “It was God that saved me.”

“As the Bible says, blessed are the peacemakers,” he told the crowd. “And, in that end, I hope my greatest legacy when it’s all finished will be known as a peacemaker and a unifier. I hope that’s going to be true.”