Nothing changes while everything changes

This is the moment that changes everything. America will never be the same. We will see this image for the rest of our lives. We are watching history unfold.

- RICHARD WARNICA

Donald Trump will rise to meet the moment. Donald Trump will emerge a different man. Donald Trump will change the tenor of the race. Joe Biden will change the tenor of the race. Politics will change. Everything will change. Everyone will take a breath and turn the temperature down. America will come together. America will split apart again, but like Velcro this time, not with violence but with a gentle tug, a rip that leaves both sides visibly part of a single whole.

For 24 hours after a 20-year-old loner fired an AR-style rifle at Donald Trump on Saturday, nicking the former U.S. president's ear and killing a bystander in the crowd, it was possible to imagine the kind of moment political biographers adore a genuine hinge point in history, an inflection after which nothing could ever be the same. It was the end of one chapter in American history. The beginning of another. A trampoline into the unknown.

Or not.

Less than 48 hours after the shooting, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday, you could pretend with very little difficulty that it had never happened at all.