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The women in my life are even more interested than I am. My mother has gone from hating politics and "not being able to look at that man" to watching the RNC each night and watching most of Trump's speech while reading aloud twitter theories about Biden almost dying, while my girlfriend went from saying she won't vote in November to wondering aloud whether she should vote for Trump. She also says repeatedly that she hates Kamala Harris and she hopes this is not who we end up with for our first female president. And both are pretty upset about the Biden situation.
I'm not sure that bullet changed Trump, but from my bubble it sure seems like it changed some moderates and conservative never-Trumpers into Trump-boosters.
I also think a lot of discussions about Democratic attacks against Trump being applied to any Republican, while true, miss that Trump himself has a polarizing effect with conservative women and moderates above and beyond whatever Democratic messaging says about him. Democrats will say any Republican is Hitler, and Democrats will always believe them. The problem is with not repelling swing voters and conservative women. The hoes that need to not be scared are voters who would go for Mitt Romney or Ron DeSantis (my girlfriend sent me repeated messages about Ron DeSantis being well-spoken and successful before he flailed out of the primaries, and my mother says she really likes Vivek Ramaswamy) but don't like Trump because he's a philanderer who insults people. If he can stick to not being overly insulting, he can win in November.
I think most of the interest is just how weird the election cycle is. Most people aren’t actually interested in politics, they’re interested in political drama. Ask these women to name five policies they actually want and who’s advocating for that policy, and 9/10 people couldn’t do that. They like politics when it’s juicy and nobody knows what’s going to happen next. It’s almost a soap opera at this point. And women tend to eat that up.
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