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Donald Trump: The GOP's ‘hope for change’ candidate
Republicans practically beg Trump to get on script, but that’s not how he got this far.
If Barack Obama became the Democratic standard-bearer for “hope and change” eight years ago, Donald Trump has become the Republican embodiment of “hope for change.”
Ever since the Manhattan billionaire captured the Republican nomination, top Republicans have been lining up to predict, more with optimism than evidence, that Trump would change, mellow, pivot, evolve and mature.
The most recent round came after Trump’s controversial attacks that the “Mexican heritage” of an American-born federal judge made him incapable of being impartial in a case about Trump University. The remarks were condemned by Republicans and Democrats alike as racist.
“He ought to change directions, and I hope that’s what we’re going to see,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said to Bloomberg. "I do think Donald Trump understands that his tone and rhetoric is going to have to evolve…I think he gets that,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told the Washington Examiner. Republican Sen. Jeff Flake told NBC, “I'm holding out hope that we'll see some changes.”
When Trump delivered a sober, teleprompter-aided election night address last Tuesday, he sought to calm GOP nerves. “I understand the responsibility of carrying the mantle,” Trump said in perhaps his most subdued speech of the cycle. "And I will never, ever let you down."
Priebus gave him rave reviews, tapping out on Twitter. “Exactly the right approach and perfectly delivered.” But many Republicans fret that Trump is a ticking time bomb, only ever a moment away from snapping back to his old self.
“You can put this guy behind the teleprompter for the next month but eventually he’s going to be alone with a keyboard and he’s going to say on Twitter what he really thinks,” said Tucker Martin, a veteran Virginia-based Republican strategist.
Sure enough, on Friday morning, three days after Trump’s latest much-analyzed “pivot,” Republicans awoke to an early morning Trump missive that reignited questions of racially charged rhetoric. “Pocahontas is at it again! Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth. Hope she is V.P. choice,” Trump had tweeted.
Republicans sighed in familiar exasperation.
“To me, it’s the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza decides to ignore his every instinct and do the opposite,” said Martin, who isn’t supporting Trump. “For a while everything goes great for George — until it all falls apart because he reverts back to his instincts.”
Trump would hold rallies in Richmond, Tampa and Pittsburgh on Friday and Saturday — returning to his familiar broadsides against fellow Republicans, including Mitt Romney (a “stone cold loser”) and Jeb Bush, who has refused to endorse him (“Who the hell cares?’’ Trump said in the state where Bush served two terms as governor).
Democrats gleefully mock talk of any Trump evolving. But they also take seriously the notion that he could make gains by adopting a more serious tone. Clinton addressed this directly herself in her speech Friday to Planned Parenthood’s conference in Washington D.C.
“The late, great Maya Angelou said: ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,’” Clinton warned the crowd. “Donald Trump has shown us who he is. And we sure should believe him.”
And her super PAC has already packaged some of his past controversial statements — about women and a clip of him imitating a disabled reporter — into ads, should voters forget.
The next test for Trump comes on Monday, in a much anticipated speech he has promised will eviscerate Clinton’s record. He previewed its themes last week, accusing her of “turning the State Department into her private hedge fund,” smacking her for giving paid speeches to special interests and saying of her many contributors: “They own her.”
Those are exactly the notes GOP strategists have been begging Trump to hit, and he did so on Friday as he used a teleprompter for the second time in the week as he spoke to a gathering of social conservatives.
Tensions over how much to modulate, and whether to modulate at all, have played out within the campaign’s Trump Tower headquarters. Paul Manafort, hired this spring to help Trump avoid a contested convention and now the campaign’s chief strategist, has talked about Trump evolving into a general election candidate. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s original campaign manager who was at his side as he rose from afterthought to frontrunner, has stuck by the internal motto: “Let Trump be Trump.”
After all, Trump’s initial team watched as their candidate rolled past a talented and well-funded Republican field by ignoring all the talk of toning it down, from calling Mexicans “rapists” in his kickoff speech and attacking Fox News personality Megyn Kelly in biting terms, to knocking Sen. John McCain as not a true war hero because he was captured as a prisoner of war.
Characteristically, Trump himself has been on both sides of his campaign’s id and ego debate.
“You win the pennant and now you’re in the World Series — you gonna change?” he told The New York Times a week after becoming the presumptive Republican nominee. “People like the way I’m doing.”
Yet at a rally in Pennsylvania a couple weeks earlier, he had predicted, “I'm going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored.”
The Republican leadership is still waiting for boring Trump. Privately, Priebus and the congressional Republican leadership have implored him to stop stepping on negative storylines about Clinton and the Democrats, be it a bad jobs report or a damaging inspector general’s report from the State Department on her emails, by stirring his own controversy.
Backstage, at the National Rifle Association convention in May, McConnell asked Trump if he had a prepared speech with him. “And he pulled it out of his pocket,” McConnell recalled in a Bloomberg podcast last week. “He said, 'You know I hate scripts, they're so boring.' And I said, 'Put me down in favor of boring.’”
On stage, Trump soon wandered off-script, vowing to end gun-free zones. “That wasn't part of my speech, I must be honest with you,” Trump confessed to cheers. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
With Trump’s unpredictability, some Republicans have begun hoping for a different kind of change: swapping out their nominee entirely. Trump has secured more than enough bound delegates to become the nominee, but convention attendees still could technically rewrite the party rules to stop him, despite the will of the voters.
“The party ought to change the nominee, because we're going to get killed with this nominee,” influential conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt said last week, comparing Trump to “stage-four cancer” for the GOP, requiring drastic action. (Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media director, responded by suggesting they ban Hewitt from the RNC convention.)
Few Republicans have been as outspoken about their Trump reservations as Speaker Paul Ryan, who withheld his endorsement for a month, and found himself calling Trump’s rhetoric “the textbook definition of a racist comment” only days after backing him.
In an interview set to air Sunday on ABC, Ryan told George Stephanopoulos, “I do think, hope, and believe that he's going to improve the tenor of the campaign” into one that is “inspirational, aspirational and inclusive.”
Stephanopoulos noted that’s not the campaign Trump is currently running.
“It's not,” Ryan admitted. But he wasn’t giving up yet.
“I hope that it gets there.”
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