Trump’s campaign transforms its tone
Staff changes part of drive to unite GOP
Ten months ago, Donald Trump spoke for about 45 minutes in the lobby of his flagship Manhattan skyscraper to lay the foundation of what would become the most successful insurgent presidential primary campaign in decades. He singled out undocumented immigrants as rapists, vowed to force Mexico to pay for a border wall and described the nation’s leaders as morally corrupt losers.
Standing in the same room of the same building on Tuesday evening was a new, more restrained candidate. His victory speech lasted just seven minutes, packed with bright hopes for a future with him as president rather than anger at Washington’s past and present misdeeds.
“With all the things that have happened today, tonight and over the week, I’ll tell you what, this has been an amazing week,” Trump said. “You’re going to be very proud of this country very soon.”
Earlier in the night, the billionaire real estate developer who once published a video of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton barking, released an overwhelmingly optimistic video that focused surprisingly on taxes, Social Security and other serious issues.
The shift in tone and emphasis on policy echoed a larger effort by Trump to transform an unorthodox, divisive juggernaut into a campaign that can unite the party and clinch the Republican nomination. But with just 15 contests left over the next seven weeks, the question is whether Trump’s makeover can succeed where his initial campaign failed.
“He’s in a real bind,” said Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster opposed to Trump. “As he tries to pull back, the intensity of the voters he’s bringing to the polls is going to come down. But if he doesn’t make that transition, the number of Republicans who say they’re not going to vote for him is just going to harden.”
Trump’s changes — including a newly empowered advising role for Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican political strategist, and hiring Rick Wiley, who managed Scott Walker’s presidential campaign — helped deliver his biggest win yet. He won his home state by one of the widest margins in the Republican presidential nomination fight, collecting nearly every delegate available. In the 10 states with the biggest delegates hauls so far, the former reality TV host has won eight.
But while he extended his lead over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, there’s no sign that’s he’s closing gap with some of his biggest critics in the party.
“His language has stirred up emotions that you can’t walk away from. And if you look behind the curtain, there’s no there there,” Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview. “Under no circumstances would I vote for him.”
Trump has stirred so much trouble within the party that House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was moved on Tuesday to urge Republicans to attend the party’s national convention in July. “This is our convention making our nominee, so I think everybody should participate,” Ryan said in an interview with CNN.
Trump isn’t on pace to gather enough delegates to win the nomination before the convention. While enjoying a commanding lead, he needs to win more than half of the 674 delegates available in the final 15 contests. Trump had won just 46 per cent of the delegates heading into the primary on Tuesday.
Hoping to unite the party behind his campaign, Manafort visited both sides of the Capitol on Tuesday to build support.
“Manafort’s serious,” said Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trump’s sole Senate endorser. “He has experience in managing at a high level these kind of campaigns.”
But for some, Trump has irreparably damaged himself.
Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, said Trump missed a window to win over party leaders. Instead, he’s sidelined them with broadsides aimed at the Republican National Committee and the nominating process. Trump has been outmanoeuvred by Cruz’s superior ground operation in many states that allocate delegates through party functions, such as local conventions, instead of elections at polling places.
“In many ways, the attacks he launched on party leaders and folks at the RNC has been counter-productive,” Madden said. “The party was split between two camps: Those who were resigned to him, and those ready to offer resistance to him. But he’s alienated all those people once he started attacking the party’s leaders and its process.”
“He had a chance to put this thing away,” Madden said. “But he’s now locked in a hand-to-hand competition over delegates as a result of his miscalculations and it shows his operation isn’t up to par.”
But other than Trump’s own forced errors, the only success in stopping Trump has been Cruz’s campaign in the state delegate contests. On Saturday, Cruz won all the delegates in Wyoming, following similar success he had in recent weeks in North Dakota and Colorado.
HIS LANGUAGE HAS STIRRED UP EMOTIONS THAT YOU CAN’T WALK AWAY FROM.