BOLD, BRASH AND UNDER RENOVATION DONALD TRUMP HITS RESET
“Let Donald Trump Be Donald Trump,” read the plaque on his campaign manager’s desk. Put the master showman before a frustrated audience and watch him pitch a totally new kind of product. The man was magic.
At least it seemed that way for months: the more Trump broke the rules, the better it seemed to work. Insult a war hero? Congrats: you win the news cycle. Float a religious test for immigration? Trump never claimed to be politically correct. Suggest his opponent abetted a rape or murder? He’s just sayin’. The Trump Show won the most votes in the history of Republican primaries. So when it came time to pivot to the general election, he wasn’t likely to rewrite the script. “You think I’m going to change?” Trump said on May 31, five days after securing enough delegates to clinch the nomination. “I’m not changing.”
Except now he must. Since that boast, Trump has plunged from dead even with Hillary Clinton to 6 points down in national surveys. During a few days in June, he attacked the fairness of a federal judge on the basis of ethnicity, delivered a widely panned response to a mass murder and seemed to hint that President Obama might have connections to Islamic terrorists. The candidate who relies on his magnetism is now the most unpopular major-party nominee in modern history, with disapproval ratings that have
