Trump uniting the country? That’s so last week.

On Monday, he demanded “the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts” — the legal cases against him — and referred to the case about his role in the 2021 attack on the Capitol as “the January 6th Hoax.” Wrote Trump: “The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.”

On Tuesday, he denounced the “Radical Left Democrats” who “are attempting to interfere in the Presidential Election, and destroy our Justice System.” The Uniter speculated that the “reason that these Communists are so despondent is that their unLawful Witch Hunts are failing everywhere.”

That evening, the Republican National Convention showed a video in which Trump announced that “we must use every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats. They are destroying our country.” He added that “we must swamp the radical Democrats” who “cheat” in elections, “and frankly it’s the only thing they do well.”

On Wednesday, Trump posted on Truth Social an image of him raising a fist after the assassination, juxtaposed with three photos of Biden stumbling on jet stairs. “TRUMP VS BULLET,” it said, and “BIDEN VS STAIRS.”

By then, Trump allies at the GOP convention had called Democrats “jackals,” “corrupt,” “feckless,” “evil” and “Marxists” who tried to kill Trump. (The failed assassin was a registered Republican, and authorities have found no evidence of a political motive.)

Ah, the warm courage of national unity.

Then came Thursday night’s closing of the GOP’s unity convention.

Eric Trump told the crowd his father had been “persecuted … by far-left Democrats,” and “ruthlessly silenced, slandered and attacked by a corrupt administration,” and he implied that “the swamp” was behind the attempted assassination.

Hulk Hogan ended his convention address by saying: “All you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags … and all you crooked politicians need to answer one question, brother: What you going to do when Donald Trump and all the Trump-a-maniacs run wild on you?”

Trump himself, after a feint toward unity — “the discord and division in our society must be healed” — soon reverted to type. He complained about the “fake documents case against me” and the “partisan witch hunts.” He denounced “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” and invoked the “China virus.” He said Democrats “used covid to cheat” and called the United States a “nation in decline” with “totally incompetent leadership,” where there is “cheating on elections.”

Despite his campaign’s claims (credulously swallowed by some in the press) that he wouldn’t mention Biden in his unifying speech, Trump told the convention that he would “take back the White House from Crooked Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of our country.” He then delivered his standard stump speech, packed with vitriol and fabrications.

It looked like I had picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

I was already missing this week’s convention to go to a reunion, and the night before I departed, the would-be assassin came within an inch of killing the man Republicans were about to nominate for president. It was the sort of national trauma that had the potential to reshape politics.

Trump, recognizing his close call had given him a huge opportunity to recast himself, vowed to unify the country. “It is a chance to bring the country together,” he told the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito the next day. Biden and other Democratic leaders recognized the importance of rising above politics. They condemned the heinous act and expressed gratitude that Trump wasn’t seriously harmed. The news media embraced the talk of unity with a newly subdued and respectful tone.

But it turns out I didn’t miss anything. The world didn’t stop, or even slow down. Republicans baselessly blamed Democrats for the shooting, and Biden and the Democrats went back to describing Trump as a liar and a felon and an aspiring autocrat. The press coverage went back to what it was before. And the public didn’t pay much attention to any of it.

After the shooting, 16 million people watched coverage of the shocking event on broadcast and cable news, Nielsen figures showed. That was considerably fewer than the 24 million who had watched Biden’s news conference after the NATO summit a couple of days earlier. This was consistent with what I saw as I traveled across the country: People weren’t crowding around televisions or scrolling for news. On Tuesday, a Reuters-Ipsos poll conducted after the shooting found that the presidential race was fundamentally unchanged, with Trump leading Biden by two percentage points, a statistical tie.

The ho-hum reaction is not a good thing, for it shows that Americans are now so numb to gun violence, mass shootings and even political violence that we are no longer surprised by it. The indifference seen in the viewership and in the polls also provides more evidence that Americans have already made up their minds about this presidential contest — and that there is seemingly nothing that will change their minds as long as these two unpalatable candidates remain the choices.

Biden’s spectacular flop at the debate may have nudged the polls a point or two in Trump’s favor, but it didn’t fundamentally alter the race. The assassination attempt didn’t either. The two candidates remain extremely unpopular. Most voters think Biden is too old and mentally unfit. Most voters think Trump is too dangerous and temperamentally unfit. Majorities wish both men would quit the race. (An Associated Press poll this week found that two thirds of Democrats want Biden out.) And they’ve tuned out this dreary and depressing presidential race. Can you blame them?

The audience for the Biden-Trump debate, 51 million, was down nearly a third from the first Biden-Trump debate of 2020 and the least-watched in 20 years. Ratings for the GOP convention have been similarly lackluster; viewership for the first two nights was down about a quarter from 2016, the party’s last in-person convention.

Were Trump a different man, he might well have had a chance to change the arc of the campaign after Saturday’s shooting. But in reality, Trump and his allies didn’t even pretend to embrace “unity,” even in the first 24 hours after the shooting. Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) alleged that “Joe Biden sent the orders” to shoot Trump and should be charged with “inciting an assassination.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) asserted: “The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.”

Donald Trump Jr. blamed Biden for the shooting, which he said was a result of “calling my dad a ‘dictator’ and a ‘threat to Democracy.’” Right-wing commentators blamed antifa, MSNBC and “girl Secret Service agents.” Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) wrote that “FAKE NEWS ‘outlets’ demonizing Trump and calling him Hitler are DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for this violent attack on President Trump’s life! They have BLOOD on their hands.”

And Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), the man Trump would tap as his running mate, wrote on Saturday that the Biden campaign’s “rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination” by characterizing Trump as “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.”

Unity didn’t have a chance once the Republican convention opened Monday in Milwaukee. Organizers went ahead with plans to have Mark Robinson address the convention. The GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina, he recently spoke of “evil” opponents and said “some folks need killing.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) told the assembled that “Americans are dying — murdered, assaulted, raped — by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice warned that “we become totally unhinged if Donald Trump is not elected in November.”

Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the House GOP conference chair, denounced “corrupt Democrat prosecutors and judges.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) said that “the radical woke progressive left” is trying to build a “borderless, lawless, Marxist, socialist utopia.”

And Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) railed against the “radical” Democrats who pose “a clear and present danger to America.”

How unifying! Asked about this by PBS, Johnson claimed that he had planned to give a more unifying address but somebody “loaded the wrong speech” on the teleprompter.

Apparently, this was a common problem, for on and off the convention floor, Republicans used the opportunity for a reset given them by the assassination attempt to spout the most vile thoughts they could think.

Speaker after speaker suggested Democrats were behind the shooting. “They tried to bankrupt him,” said Trump’s former housing secretary, Ben Carson. “They tried to put him in prison. … And then, last weekend, they tried to kill him.” Eric Trump agreed, telling CNN that “they tried to take his life.”

Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) told Real America’s Voice that “they wanted to indict and imprison him” and “now they tried to kill him.”

Ron Johnson told the same outlet that there were “rumors swirling” that the Secret Service had diverted agents from Trump’s detail to protect first lady Jill Biden. He, and others, blamed “DEI” — diversity, equity and inclusion — at the Secret Service, which is led by a woman, Kimberly Cheatle.

The vitriol was gratuitous and ubiquitous. Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake began her convention speech by welcoming “everybody in this great arena tonight” before adding: “I don’t mean that. I don’t welcome everybody.” She then induced the crowd to boo the “fake news” journalists in attendance. (After Saturday’s shooting in Pennsylvania, the crowd immediately turned on the media, blaming them for the bloodshed — as did figures such as Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.)

Trump adviser Chris LaCivita, who previously posted and deleted a message blaming Biden’s rhetoric for the attempted assassination, played off a fundraising appeal by Biden to say the president is sick “in the head.” Donald Trump Jr. told Axios that the only way Democrats could win in November was by cheating — and his sister-in-law, Lara Trump, now a top RNC official, concurred.

Before a speech by former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, recently imprisoned for refusing to comply with a subpoena, organizers distributed posters that demanded “MASS DEPORTATION NOW.” Navarro told them Trump had been right in 2015 to say that migrants crossing the border are “murderers and rapists,” as well as “drug cartels, human traffickers, terrorists, Chinese spies and a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens stealing the jobs of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans.” Navarro also blamed “lawfare jackals” for firing “figurative and now literal bullets at Donald Trump.”

A lot of the nastiness was transphobic; Greene used her speech to denounce the coincidence of Transgender Visibility Day, which has been observed on March 31 for 15 years, occurring on the same day as Easter Sunday this year. But migrants arguably received the most abuse. When Vance, in his acceptance speech Wednesday, said that “Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens,” the crowd chanted: “Send them back!”

Even after days of such ugly displays at the convention, Vance praised Trump because “he called for national unity” after the shooting. “When Donald Trump rose to his feet in that Pennsylvania field, all of America stood with him,” Vance said.

So it might have been. But Trump is squandering all the sympathy and goodwill — and any hope that the country might heal.