Donald Trump Promised a Softer Image. He Delivered Hulkamania.

Who is Donald J. Trump?

After over four decades of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV stardom and presidential politics, you would think this would be a settled question. But after his near assassination in Pennsylvania, the Republican National Convention teased that the former president was going to unveil a softer, changed version of himself. He would recast his acceptance speech to emphasize “unity,” a word that, in four days of TV coverage, was endlessly parroted and rarely defined.

Mr. Trump turned himself into his own surprise guest. Would the final night of the convention portray him as a bellicose, combative alpha male, or as a sensitive late convert to empathy and self-reflection?

The answer was: Yes, and yes. The night began with a pageant of hypermasculinity, with musclemen and ripped garments. It led to Mr. Trump’s taking the stage with a new, somber voice as he recounted his brush with death. Then, over the course of a digressive hour-and-a-half speech, he somehow changed back before our eyes.

First came The Man Show. The introductory hours of the night featured a rotation of admirers, heavily male, who cited Mr. Trump’s close call and defiant survival as testimony to his macho fighting spirit.

This is what male identity politics looks like. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality — who has embraced the alt-right angst over testosterone levels — spoke off the cuff, suggesting that the shooting established Mr. Trump as a leader on a biological level. “A leader is the bravest man,” Mr. Carlson said. “This is a law of nature.”Kid Rock retooled his rap-metal anthem “American Bad Ass,” exhorting the delegates to throw up their fists and “Say fight! Fight! Say Trump! Trump!” Dana White, the beefy chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, introduced Mr. Trump.

But the splashiest spectacle brought Hulkamania to Milwaukee. Terry G. Bollea, the handlebar-mustached wrestler who performs as Hulk Hogan, took the stage in character to praise “my hero, that gladiator,” working himself into a rage over the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life and ripping open his shirt to expose a “TRUMP-VANCE” tank top.

This was a protein shake of a closing-night program; they could sell it at GNC.

But if it was unusual for a party convention, it was of a piece with the nominee’s tastes. Mr. Trump has long based his persona on strength, dominance and performative masculinity. He’s drawn to strongmen, political and literal.

As a child, like many kids of the 1950s, Mr. Trump loved TV wrestling and its showmanship. As a businessman, he brought the WrestleMania event to the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. In 2007, he “fought” World Wrestling Entertainment’s chief, Vince McMahon, in the “Battle of the Billionaires.”

Mr. Trump has always loved a fight and fight imagery. And his political followers love his pugilistic spirit; the Trumpamania of Thursday night had the convention floor as jubilant and electric as it had been all week. Mr. Trump’s instinctual response to the shooting — a raised fist and the cry “Fight! Fight!” — was a convention refrain.

But all week, we had also heard that facing mortality had left Mr. Trump mellowed and that his acceptance speech would reveal a new person.

The opening section, as he recounted the shooting, was indeed a Donald Trump we had not heard before. His voice slowed and shook. His register was low, his tone hushed, his bearing subdued. The TV camera held tight to his face. “I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” he said.

His imagery was different too. To the side of Mr. Trump stood the empty uniform of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter killed in the audience at Saturday’s rally. At one point the overhead monitors showed close-up photos of Mr. Trump prostrate on the Pennsylvania stage, blood trickling down his face. It was almost eerie to see this blustering, boastful omnipresence allow himself to be seen this way — wounded, vulnerable, mortal. The political world might well be talking about a new Donald Trump now, had the speech ended there.

It did not.

As Mr. Trump made the case that political comity required the dropping of the legal cases against him, his energy and volume shifted. He went repeatedly off-prompter, and Rally Trump returned, bashing “Crazy Nancy Pelosi,” calling Covid-19 the “China virus,” decrying Democratic election “cheating,” giving a shout-out to Hannibal Lecter.

Mr. Trump seemed to be merging his promised reboot (sober, restrained) with his old self (digressive, aggrieved). The rest of the very, very long address became like a rendition of his riffing, hyperbolic stump speeches, played at half speed. Even the loyalist crowd, rapt at the beginning, seemed to drift off.

The speech capped off a convention that showed off a party ecstatic over its odds of winning. But it left open which Trump would finish out the campaign, let alone govern if he won. The new Trump or the old? The nice guy or the antihero? In wrestling terms, the face or the heel?

There’s another term in pro wrestling, “kayfabe,” the convention of pretending that the characters in the ring and their histrionic passions are real. Mr. Bollea strikingly broke kayfabe, telling the crowd that the amped-up “Hulk Hogan” was a character and that now he was speaking for his true self.

This is where the wrestler differed from the candidate. Only one was willing to spell out which of his two selves onstage was the performance, and which one might be him.