A Conflicted Donald Trump Tries a New Tactic: Sticking to the Script

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After months of flailing attempts, Donald J. Trump has begun to recast his political message in more structured terms and wrestle with his temptation to go off script, as his campaign seeks to revive his fading candidacy and turn the focus this fall to Hillary Clinton’s honesty and integrity.

Working off a script from his reshuffled team of advisers, Mr. Trump is also drastically tempering his language about the signature issue of his campaign: immigration. After winning the Republican nomination on a promise to deport all 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally, he indicated on Wednesday night that he was considering allowing some to stay if they had lived in the United States for many years, lacked criminal records and paid back taxes.

“We are going to come out with a decision very soon,” he said on Fox News, signaling flexibility on an issue that sharply divides undecided voters. He is expected to deliver a speech on immigration next week in Phoenix.

Mr. Trump is also spending far less time attacking his fellow Republicans and picking fights with people other than Mrs. Clinton, instead hammering away at her State Department tenure and her family’s charitable foundation. And he is aligning his stump speeches with his television advertising, vowing to crack down on violent crime and improve border security.

Aware of his unpopularity with white moderate voters, especially women who have been turned off by his racially charged words, he is trying to show interest in the lives of African-Americans and Hispanics, too, even as he uses language that offends those groups.

Many Republicans, weary of repeated promises of a reborn Mr. Trump, remain skeptical that he can stick to his message over the next 11 weeks, and some say it is too late to persuade most voters to see him anew.

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And the message he has delivered with fresh rigor, especially his emphasis on crime, still diverges widely from what most Republicans view as a winning pitch.

Even Mr. Trump is not sure he can be letter-perfect. He said in an interview that he still loved his freewheeling rallies of old, even when they got him in trouble, and that he would not always rely on prepared remarks or stop waging warfare with his Twitter account, even if he ended up overshadowing his advisers’ preferred arguments.

Yet Mr. Trump seems to be confronting the reality that his political fortunes could rise or fall on his ability to show restraint.

Over the last week, his new political team shared grim polling data with Mr. Trump and told him directly that he was in grave danger of losing if he did not sharpen and steadily prosecute strong arguments against Mrs. Clinton. He came away persuaded and has been heartened by upticks in some recent polls.

“I have been staying on message more now because, ultimately, I’m finding that I do better with voters, do better in the polls, when I’m on message,” he said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

Mr. Trump ousted his chief strategist, Paul Manafort, last week and appointed two advisers who had more expertise with his brand of bare-knuckle public relations: Kellyanne Conway, a veteran pollster and cable news commentator, and Stephen K. Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, a conservative website.

Mr. Trump sees Ms. Conway as a polished and energetic defender who can help him attract female voters and shape the message that he wants to deliver, rather than impose one on him. She, in turn, wanted him to have prepared remarks at rallies, and he decided to use teleprompters to help stick to those scripts.

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“Ultimately, I said I want to do this my way,” he said. “I had 80 days at the time, and I want to do it my way.”

Few presidential candidates have indulged their impulses and spoken off-the-cuff as much as Mr. Trump, a political outsider who is used to playing the tough guy in boardrooms and business negotiations. Assuming the role of party standard-bearer has been a struggle for him, and even now, as he tries to follow a new script, he has not abandoned the caustic tone that has defined his candidacy.

His evolving language on immigration reflects his conflicting desires: In the space of a few hours on Tuesday, he said he was open to “softening” his hard-line policies toward some people who had entered the country illegally and then whipped up a rally in Austin, Tex., with promises to make Mexico pay for a border wall.

His new pleas for support from black voters have also carried a hard edge, including last week in Wisconsin, when he questioned why they would not vote for him. Describing blacks as besieged by crime and bereft of economic opportunity, he asked, “What the hell do you have to lose?” In Ohio on Monday, he described American cities as more dangerous than war zones, and in Mississippi on Wednesday night, he called Mrs. Clinton a “bigot” who courted minorities only for their votes.

And at a rally in Tampa, Fla., on Wednesday, Mr. Trump still showed a penchant for going off script, reading the word “premeditation” as “premedication” during an attack on Mrs. Clinton — and then, after a pause, saying he preferred “premedication,” an apparent nod to conspiracy theories that his allies have spread about her health.

Several Republican leaders and strategists, including those critical of Mr. Trump, said they had noticed adjustments in his performance since Ms. Conway became his campaign manager last week. Where previous advisers have sought to recraft the basics of his message, the new team around him appears intent mainly on arranging his favorite themes in a more consistent, linear format.

Still, with early voting set to begin in many states in late September and October, and given Mr. Trump’s history of popping off on Twitter, at rallies or in cable interviews at any moment, they said it was impossible to say whether his current message would endure and help turn the focus to Mrs. Clinton’s character.

“Is what he’s doing enough for him to win? We’ve got to play the hand we’re dealt, so it will have to be enough, but it’s very hard to know,” said Matt Borges, the head of the Ohio Republican Party, who has urged Mr. Trump to adopt a more positive tone. “He just needs to focus on all of Hillary Clinton’s problems. But look, we’ve all been saying that for months.”

John Brabender, a Republican strategist who has worked extensively in swing states, said there was clearly an effort in progress to guide Mr. Trump toward a “more focused and more consistently delivered message,” within the limits of what comes naturally to him. But Mr. Brabender also suggested that Mr. Trump needed to do more.

“He should be talking about: What is the vision of what America is going to look like after four years of Donald Trump, and what does that mean for people’s lives?” Mr. Brabender said, allowing that Mr. Trump had improved on his practice of “making it up at every campaign stop they have.”

Mr. Trump, in the interview, argued that it took “more talent to do freethinking rallies” than to stick to a script, noting that he had to remember to make points about jobs and immigration while also engaging his audiences. He said that he was adjusting to his latest style of communicating, and that it sometimes felt at odds with his desire to entertain the crowds at his rallies. Yet as he mulls important shifts on immigration, he is still making muddled statements and remains far from clear on policy details.

There are signs of change. In an interview last month, shortly after the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, issued scathing comments about Mrs. Clinton’s email practices as secretary of state, Mr. Trump said he could not “spend more than five minutes talking about her emails at my rallies, because people will lose interest, and you have to talk about other things to keep their attention.” But in the interview this week, he said he needed to “give people a mix of things at the rallies” and wanted “to be more on message.”

“Now we’re getting to Labor Day, and things will be different,” he said.

Still, if aides have helped bring new focus to Mr. Trump’s stump speech, they have been unable to tame him on social media, where he continues to deliver outlandish attacks on all manner of adversaries, especially in the news media. He attacked the MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough on Monday in extraordinarily personal terms and threatened to “tell the real story” about them.

Mr. Trump said he would not hesitate to do so again if they criticized him, or to consider taking on others — even if that meant stepping on his scripted message.

“If people hit me, I will certainly hit back,” he said. “That will never change.”