TRUMP PIVOTS -- TO TEDIUM?

Donald Trump stirred up a lot of anger last week, but Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson tells us that by Sunday he was making nice. The conventional wisdom is that Trump has to start dialing down the unpleasantness as he focuses on the general election -- but isn't unpleasantness precisely what his supporters want?

For months, Donald Trump started his events with a 20-minute rundown of the polls. On Sunday, he led off with something different.

He reminisced about the violence at his rallies, and said he hoped that peace would be restored. “We had some, let’s be nice, let’s call them protesters,” he said, recalling the rally in Chicago on March 11 that was canceled as a protest erupted. “And we had had a decision to make. We had to make this decision. We want peace, we want happiness, we want everyone to go home really happy, really peaceful, so we said, ‘you know what we’ll do, we’ll postpone it,’ and it was a really wise decision.”

... There was little chance of an outbreak of hostilities at his event on Sunday in Boca Raton, Florida.... Just in case, upon entering, security took “anything hard that could be thrown,” including thousands of umbrellas (it was cloudy) and water bottles.

... As night fell in Boca, Trump made a dramatic entrance.... A few minutes later, he offered an olive branch of sorts in the form of a linguistic change, asking the audience to call protesters “disruptors.”

... Trump congratulates himself for never using a teleprompter, but his performances are all the same. There’s China and the trade deficit, how much better he is than Hillary Clinton, how bad President Barack Obama is, how he’s not owned by anyone since he’s paying for the microphone....

But there was no violence, no turbulence, no Trump getting chesty as other people commit violent acts on his behalf.

And how'd that go over, according to Carlson?

Surprisingly, hordes of people depart the love-in about a half hour in. Maybe it’s the traffic. Or maybe they’ve heard it all before. Or maybe they’re disappointed. They hoped to be part of that other Trump movement. They want to see him make war (enough at least to make the news), not love.

I'm sure that's right. There's nothing surprising about it at all.

See, this is why Trump can't simply become a tame, domesticated general-election candidate: He'd be boring. He'd be depriving his base of what it wants from him. (The media, too -- if he's like this all through September and October, sooner or later even cable news will stop giving him saturation coverage.) If he civilizes himself, he'll be just like every other politician.

Notice that this rally didn't make any news. I think it's far more likely that Trump will realize that he can't stop pushing people's buttons because his TV coverage will suffer as a result. So maybe he'll make an effort not to incite any more riots -- but he'll be a goon in some other way. He's simply not going to get the attention he craves if he behaves.