Responding to the attempt to assassinate his Republican challenger, Donald Trump, and the hatefulness that has infected national politics, President Joe Biden told the nation Sunday, "It's time to cool it down." It would be good if Trump expressed a similar thought this week as he accepts the Republican National Convention's presidential nomination for the third time.

Having just survived a shooting after facing criminal prosecutions that would not have been brought against him except for politics, Trump may be entitled to more rage and narcissism. Will he realize that the assassination attempt has emphasized his martyrdom to enough people and won him some sympathy so that more rage from him would be unnecessary and counterproductive, and that the election is likely his if he can indeed "cool it down"?

Polls suggest that amid high inflation, a flood of illegal immigration, another "forever" war and ridiculous wokeness the Biden administration is widely regarded as a disaster. Last week Connecticut U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th District, urged Biden to give up re-nomination, Gov. Ned Lamont quietly concurred, and Connecticut's U.S. senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, hinted that Biden is no longer up to his job. If even leading Democrats in solidly Democratic Connecticut can be that candid about it, the disaster is beyond obvious.

But polls also suggest that, outside the Republican base, Trump's demeanor is a disaster. His policies may make more sense than Biden's but his demeanor is preventing him from winning the votes he most needs, the votes in the middle. Biden's collapse into senility at his debate with Trump on June 27 should have quickly pushed Trump into a 15-point lead, but the polls barely changed. At least prior to the assassination attempt half the country still preferred even a comatose Biden to a manic, blustering, bullying and insulting Trump.

Both sides have been poisoning politics, though the Democrats, panicking over Biden since the debate, have been doing it more, as by likening Trump to Hitler. Now that the camouflage long given to Biden's mental and physical decline by the White House staff, Democratic leaders and national news organizations has been stripped away, few people think he is capable of being president for another six months, much less another four years.

But Trump does not yet inspire much more confidence.

Trump has embodied well-deserved contempt for government and politics. But contempt is easy; governing and building consensus is hard, and Trump's four years in power, far from revealing him as the murderous totalitarian of liberal paranoia, showed him to be mainly lazy even when his policy was correct.

Somehow Ronald Reagan got away with running against the federal government not only when he was challenging the inept Jimmy Carter in 1980 but even when he was running for re-election in 1984, after having been in charge of the government for four years. Maybe Reagan's good humor and cordial demeanor caused voters to overlook the irony.

But Trump lacks good humor and cordiality, and awful as the Biden administration is, many people still may remember the personnel chaos and backbiting of the Trump administration and Trump's own incessant angry or insulting tweets from the White House. Tweeting isn't governing.

Has the bullet he barely dodged taught Trump anything? The country may never know what exactly was in the mind of the young man who fired it, but the country is full of people who might have rejoiced if Trump had not dodged the bullet, just as the country is full of people who might rejoice at Biden's unnatural demise. That is an environment for civil war.

At least the assassination attempt may have taught the Democrats something. Since last weekend they have been sending wishes for a quick recovery to the man they had just been denouncing as the reincarnation of Hitler. Insincere, of course, but a welcome return to civility.

Can Trump become civil, and serious? Or does he not want to be president again that much?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. He can be reached at CPowell@cox.net.