Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science, University of Toronto
Last Thursday, Donald Trump unveiled his new self, thus adding a new wrinkle to an already wild and crazy campaign. His narcissism had lost his magic, the triumphant bully having morphed into the hapless bull in a china shop. Will Thursday's image reboot change anything?
In all likelihood, it will only make Mr. Trump's situation worse. His new self-presentation is the fuzzy outcome of an incoherent shuffling of his campaign staff. Out is Paul Manafort, a relatively conventional campaign chief. In is a team that appears as such in name only.
New in the first position is Stephen Bannon, not an improvement over Mr. Manafort. Mr. Bannon's previous job was helming Breitbart News, a website that not only embraced but anticipated Mr. Trump's right-wing populism. (In 2011, Mr. Bannon predicted that populism would capture the Republican Party.)
An ardent admirer of Mr. Trump, he led Breitbart in a vendetta against mainline conservatives cool to him.
He is a favourite of the alternative right, which is nativist and racialist. Its leaders welcomed his appointment as signalling not that Mr. Trump was pulling back, but that he was doubling down.
The campaign's new second banana, however, sends a very different message. Pollster Kellyanne Conway, while a staunch conservative, has made a career not of hardening the right's public image but of softening it. She has specialized in tutoring conservative candidates in how to present themselves to women.
Mr. Trump's Thursday statement evidently reflected Ms. Conway's influence. In both style and content it departed from his past performances. First, he used a teleprompter, crimping his spontaneity. He read a prepared statement which did not sound like his own. Nor in reading it did he sound like his boisterous self.
Yes, other politicians including Hillary Clinton routinely use teleprompters. But that's just the problem: Donald Trump is not supposed to be a politician. He claims to speak from the heart (and shoot from the hip). The politicians, are scripted; Mr. Trump proudly flies by the seat of his pants. A packaged Trump is a failed Trump. Other candidates can rely on a script to make sure they stay on message; he can stay on message only by staying offscript.
A dependency on canned statements is therefore contrary to his deepest instincts. Tethered to a teleprompter, he would menace the safety of himself and others, a pressure cooker given to blowing its top.
If the teleprompter was one surprising feature of the new Mr. Trump, the apology that he offered was another. There he was, expressing regret for any words of his that had caused pain. Enter (stage left?) the Mr. Trump of compassion, Ms. Conway's Mr. Trump. But let's not get carried away; he didn't. He neither apologized for anything specific nor retracted any previous statement. Suggesting that his only offence had been to be truthful, he assured his audience that he would remain so.
There followed a blast against Ms. Clinton's alleged lies. On balance this hardly seemed a new Mr. Trump. He remained more the gonzo Mr. Trump of Mr. Bannon than the conciliatory one of Ms. Conway.
Mr. Trump's next major statement was his appeal for black support, delivered in a mostly white suburb. It continued the fiasco of what Ms. Conway would dub the best week of his campaign so far. It was crude, hyperbolic and so dependent on stereotypes of black American life that some pundits perversely read it not as an attempt at outreach but as placation of his core (white) constituency.
As this campaign week dawned, a persistent rumour circulated: that a major policy "pivot" was imminent. Mr. Trump's efforts at outreach would accelerate as he offered a new position on immigration; in particular, he would abandon his insistence on the deportation of America's 11 million illegal aliens. (Ms. Conway declined to scotch this rumour.)
Given the centrality of the demanded deportation to Mr. Trump's campaign from the outset, for him to abandon it would be mind-boggling. Mr. Trump the truthful would forfeit his last shred of credibility. In quest of voters for whom he has no chance, he would give his core supporters every reason to write him off as just another two-faced politician. Increasingly he seems pitiably inept, blustering his way simultaneously in opposite directions into the electoral abyss.