‘Gentler’ Trump manages to offend blacks

DONALD TRUMP’S efforts to project a kinder, gentler image are off to a rocky start after he said black people had nothing to lose in voting for him because their lives could not get any worse.

Following an overhaul of his campaign leadership amid sinking poll numbers, Mr Trump made smoothing out his rough edges a top priority over the past week.

The property tycoon expressed regret for saying “the wrong things” at times, and causing “personal pain”.

The following day he travelled to Louisiana to survey flood damage, handing out supplies and declaring: “We are all one nation. When one hurts, we all hurt.”

The narrative of campaign disarray began to give way to a discussion of the “New Trump chose to make his pitch to black voters in Dimondale, Michigan, which is 93 per cent white and just 0.7 per cent black.

Predictably, Hillary Clinton’s campaign sought to capitalise. “This is so ignorant it’s staggering,” came a post from her Twitter account.

Marlon Marshall, who runs Mrs Clinton’s outreach to black voters, said: “Painting the entire African-American community as living in poverty shows he’s completely out of touch with us.”

George Wallace, the comedian, weighed in, saying: “I’d love to chat with Trump about how black people are all ‘living in poverty’ but I can’t decide which of my houses we should meet at.”

A Fox News poll earlier this month showed Mr Trump with just 1 per cent of the black vote, compared with Mrs Clinton’s 85 per cent.

In his Michigan speech, though, he guaranteed that he would win “over 95 per cent” of the black vote in 2020.

Mr Trump’s newfound emphasis on less friendly demographics has been attributed to Kellyanne Conway, named on Wednesday as his new campaign manager.

Mrs Conway specialises in outreach to women voters, and will run the Trump operation alongside Steven Bannon, who left Breitbart, the far-Right website, to become the campaign’s chief executive.

They replace Paul Manafort, who resigned as campaign chairman on Friday.

Mr Manafort is under FBI investigation for his work advising Viktor Yanukovich, the former pro-Moscow president of Ukraine.

The new team has its work cut out. Polls show Mr Trump trailing Mrs Clinton by an average of six points nationally, and in nearly all of the key swing states.