PENSACOLA, Fla. – Republicans have may finally hit on the one easy trick to making their presidential nominee palatable: Minimize the words emerging from Donald Trump’s mouth that aren’t written ahead of time by somebody else.
Since his most recent campaign shakeup last month, Trump has not held a news conference, has cut back on in-depth Sunday show appearances and has almost completely eliminated speeches that aren’t scripted and displayed on his teleprompter screens.
“If he has the discipline to simply read a script that’s been written by someone that’s somewhat competent, he can probably avoid some unforced errors,” said Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire GOP who has refused to back Trump. “A change in approach doesn’t fool me.”
Nevertheless, if recent polls are accurate, the plan does seem to be working: Voters are responding better to Trump talking more like a generic Republican than they did to Trump talking like Trump.
“The public seems to be moving back to him, because the risk seems to be getting less,” said one top Republican National Committee member, who spoke on condition of anonymity to freely discuss the nominee.
“They’re trying as best as they can to control his message, and they’re doing a pretty good job of it,” said Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
“If he has the discipline to simply read a script that’s been written by someone that’s somewhat competent, he can probably avoid some unforced errors.”
- Fergus Cullen, former chairman of the New Hampshire GOP
Of course, just having the teleprompter there and loaded with the staff-written script doesn’t mean Trump will necessarily stick to it, particular at evening rallies where he appears to feed off of the riled-up audiences. This has led to Jekyll-and-Hyde transformations ― a flat reading of standard Republican boilerplate, flipping to bizarre Trumpian claims and insults and back again, sometimes in the span of a minute.
At a crowded rally in Pensacola’s 10,000-seat arena on Friday, Trump was off-script for longer than he was on it, ad-libbing on a variety of topics.
Where the script had him repeat a familiar GOP talking point about increasing the number of ships in the Navy, Trump used that opportunity to issue a warning. “When Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats, and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water,” he said.
A few minutes later, when the script called for Trump to talk about the Iranian nuclear deal and other foreign policy matters, Trump took a sudden detour and accused President Barack Obama’s administration of protecting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to the point where she could commit cold-blooded murder with impunity. “She is being so protected, she could walk into this arena right now, and shoot somebody with 20,000 people watching ― right smack in the middle of the heart ― and she wouldn’t be prosecuted, okay?” Trump said.
Ten minutes later, apropos of nothing, Trump decided to weigh in on Clinton’s mental health. “Personally, I think she’s unstable,” he said.
“It’s like when King Kong had the chains around him, and it could only last for so long,” Ornstein said, referring to Trump. “He still has to be him.”
Nonetheless, Republicans who watched in dismay as Trump spent late July and early August attacking fellow Republicans and the family of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq are now relieved he is doing more reading and less blurting.
Michael Caputo, a former campaign staffer who still supports Trump despite a pay dispute, said he was thrilled to see the GOP nominee doing this. “It’s a new tactic for him that’s been working, and I believe he likes the results: a campaign on the rise and hitting on all cylinders,” Caputo said.
But successfully force-feeding Trump via his teleprompter to make him a better candidate raises the next question: How might Republican Party leaders transform someone with so little demonstrated knowledge or even interest in public policy into a competent president, should he win?
Trump’s transition team, led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), has been grappling with that question for weeks, according to the RNC member: “There are a hundred people working on this ... I believe there is a very strong team of people who will help him shape policies for this country.”
Yet the American Enterprise Institute’s Ornstein does not believe that’s possible. And even worse, he said, he thinks Republicans aren’t really that interested in trying. Too many Republicans have fallen back on tribal instincts to support Trump, are hoping for patronage jobs in a Trump administration or are fixated on preventing Clinton from naming the next Supreme Court justices, Ornstein said.
As for the idea that Trump will surround himself with grown-ups, “What if your grown-ups are Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn?” he wondered, naming the former New York City mayor and former Defense Department official who have become increasingly shrill in their criticism of Clinton.
“I’ve got zero confidence in his ability to administer,” said the New Hampshire GOP’s Cullen. “He can’t manage his own campaign, and that’s a much smaller organization.”
Even the RNC member concedes that his support for Trump is not particularly well-founded. “I think you’ll find him to be a much better president than people realize. How do I know that? I don’t know that,” he said.
In this instance, he is ready to flip an old truism, and is certain that “the devil you don’t know” ― Trump ― is better than “the devil you know” ― Clinton. “I do know what she’s like, and that’s enough to make me for Trump,” he said.
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