Donald Trump vows to be ‘nicer’ – but nobody is buying it

It is called a reset – the point in a usually flailing political campaign when the candidate, or more often the candidate’s advisers, decide it’s time for a makeover.

Need to hug more babies? No problem. Need to reach out to blue collar workers by visiting a car assembly line? No problem. Try and act in a rather more presidential manner? Well... That might be a problem.

Donald Trump, the notoriously unscripted Republican candidate who has run a presidential campaign like none that has gone before, has apparently agreed to undergo a another such reset. Yet experts have serious doubts as to whether he will be able to stick to it, or at this late stage if it will make any difference.

After a disastrous few weeks, in which he appeared to invite the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email, got into a pointless fight with the parents of a dead American soldier and received a word in the ear from the Secret Service after raising the prospect of shooting his rival, Mr Trump has apparently agreed to try and change course.

“I’m now listening to people that are telling me to be easier, to be nicer, be softer. That’s OK, and I’m doing that,” he told Time magazine.

“I don’t know if that’s what the country wants. When we’re having heads chopped off in the Middle East, when things are happening that have never happened before in terms of the atrocities… I think maybe they want tougher rhetoric.”

This is not the first time Mr Trump has agreed to listen to advisors. After he won the New York primary with an easy margin, there was a two-week period when he appeared to “pivot” towards more presidential behaviour. It coincided with his decision to hire the services of a professional campaign advisor, Paul Manafort.

Yet every time, the Republican establishment thinks it has got its candidate on message, persuading him to literally stick to the script on the teleprompter, Mr Trump cannot help himself.

It was an apparently unscripted aside during a speech in North Carolina that got him in trouble with the Secret Service.

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment,” he had said, referring to the piece of legislation that gun rights activists claim gives them the right to bear weapons. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is.”

Larry Sabato, Director of the Centre of Politics at the University of Virginia, told The Independent he had little faith that Mr Trump could stick to a new image.

“Trump campaign resets are like his second and third marriages – the triumph of hope over experience. It’s not in Trump’s DNA to campaign in a controlled, disciplined manner,” he said.

Indeed, Mr Trump has made clear that he thinks the style in which he defeated 16 Republican rivals to secure the primary, is the one he should stick with.

“I would say that I like the previous (style) better,” he told Time. “I can always revert to that if I want. It was more of an attacking style, which perhaps is a more natural style for me. There’s always a chance that I will do that and can go back to that.”

The pressure on Mr Trump to change course comes as a series of polls shows him slipping further behind his Democratic rival. An average of polls collated by Real Clear Politics suggests Ms Clinton to be anywhere between four to ten points ahead of him. In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, one poll gives her an eleven point margin.

Jeanne Zaino, Professor of Political Science at Iona College in New York, said Mr Trump has shown little inclination to change his style.

“I question whether he believes it is really necessary,” she said. “I’m not sure he really believes that, and that may explain why he has not been able to commit to it.”

As to whether it would make any difference to Mr Trump’s fortunes at this stage, she said the trouble was that most people already knew lots about the New York tycoon. “That is one of the problems of being so high profile,” she added. “And I think that the polls are showing that people are starting to move away from him.”