Can a brush with death change a person like Donald Trump?
As the uproar following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump dies down, and with the start of the long-anticipated Republican convention, new comments by the former president calling for “unity and resilience” have left a question hanging in the air: Can a brush with death change a person like Trump?
There is a considerable body of evidence that near-death experiences can bring about profound and lasting changes in those who undergo them. As Dr. Bruce Greyson, a specialist in psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia — and one of the world's leading experts on near-death experiences — explains, “Here's this experience that in a few seconds, can totally transform someone's attitudes, values, beliefs and behavior."
“They typically make people more spiritual,” he added, “more compassionate, more caring.” This change, Greyson says, “does not go away with time.”
Could it possibly lead Trump to recognize the deep division in America and the need to do something now to try to heal those divisions?
He told the New York Post on Monday that a new GOP convention speech was in the works because “I want to try to unite our country...but I don’t know if that’s possible. People are very divided.”
That gave us a reason to feel hopeful.
But in the same interview, he also undercut that message: “Some people want open borders, some don’t. Some want men to be able to play on women’s sport teams, and others don’t.’”
That’s not uncharacteristic.
We would be less than candid if we did not recognize that Trump has played the leading role in the dividing of America, encouraged by foreign American adversaries like Vladimir Putin. It could well be that his call for national unity is a campaign feint.
He is running for president, and politics, it is often said, is a game of addition, not subtraction. To win elections, candidates must expand their base by veering toward the middle.
It could also be that his call for unity is merely intended to get everyone in his party unified behind him. That would mean that Sunday’s close encounter with death had no transformative effect at all.
We won’t likely know from this week’s convention whether we are witnessing politics as usual or a meaningful conversion and interest in unity. Either way, it’s fair to expect more talk of bringing us together.
But in the weeks to come, there is a stress test for separating authenticity from manipulation.
Like Rome, unity isn’t built in a day. Coming from someone who has championed the “us versus them” mentality of our times, true belief in one America isn’t proven even by sustained advocacy of bridge building. It is proven by lasting behavior changes and authentic renunciation of division.
Here are some things to look for:
You can think of more such questions. But the proof of sincere commitment to unity will be in the pudding. And there’s a lot of pudding that needs a remix.
We will all be his jurors over the next three months, rendering a verdict in November. Juries work because they collectively assess the demeanor of witnesses, including criminal defendants who testify. Jurors can separate authenticity from manipulation. So can sensible Americans — including independent voters who are not committed irretrievably to one candidate or a party.
We will know what Trump really means about unity by watching what he does and listening to what he disavows in the weeks to come. Given his history of divisiveness, he has a steep hill to climb to convince us that he has changed. That history calls for us to start with skepticism about whether he has had a true conversion experience, rather than one that simply seeks to exploit a close call in order to regain power.
It won’t take long to find out; human behavior tends quickly to revert to the mean unless the mean has drastically shifted. We can keep open a wary eye, while leaving room for hope’s eternal spring.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Amherst College. Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and civil litigator, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
