Donald Trump tries gentler side to revive flagging campaign

A day after presenting a new kinder, gentler side, Donald Trump followed up his softer words at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Thursday night with a compassionate visit to Louisiana to assess the damage caused by flooding.

Joined by his running mate, Indiana governor Mike Pence, the Republican presidential nominee scored not just a few points in the warm and fuzzy column, but against President Barack Obama too.

On Thursday, Louisiana's largest daily newspaper, The Advocate, called on Obama to cut short his summer holiday on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard to view the flood-devastated areas.

Just hours before Trump landed in Baton Rouge, his son Eric criticised Obama for not travelling to Louisiana in an interview with Fox News, saying that the president "can't stop a round of golf to go check in on the victims of this awful tragedy".

The images of Trump and Pence handing out emergency supplies from the back of a truck in St Amant, Louisiana, are designed to take the edge off the nominee’s hard man reputation.

The co-ordinated timing of all this would have been positive for the Trump campaign had it not been for Friday morning's announcement that Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman and chief strategist, was resigning. Manafort's departure is the last piece of unfinished business from the revamp of the Trump campaign team, announced on Wednesday.

His resignation came at the end of a week of big change for Trump, the most significant in his 14-month campaign as he attempts to reset his floundering campaign.

Trump promoted veteran Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway to the role of campaign manager, held by Manafort since Trump fired Corey Lewandowski in June, and tapped former investment banker Steve Bannon, executive chairman of the provocative conservative Breitbart News, to be the campaign's chief executive.

The appointments marked the effective sidelining of Manafort and his strategy to temper Trump’s message and the candidate, in an attempt to woo middle-ground voters turned off by his abrasive, insulting manner. “I am very appreciative for his great work in helping to get us where we are today, and in particular his work guiding us through the delegate and convention process,” said Trump, referring to last month’s Republican convention where he secured the party’s nomination.

Since then, the campaign has suffered from a string of Trump gaffes and, more recently, a drip-feed of damaging stories about Manafort's ties to Russian-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and a corruption investigation in the country.

That, coupled with Trump's reported unhappiness with leaks from inside his campaign team and his complaints about being boxed in by Manafort, along with his sinking poll numbers against Hillary Clinton, were enough to spell the end of their relationship.

"My father didn't want to be, you know, distracted by whatever things Paul was dealing with," Eric Trump told Fox News, talking up what Bannon and Conway were bringing to the campaign and the new refocus of the campaign. Conway's fingerprints could certainly be seen on Trump's speech in Charlotte on Thursday night. For the first time in his campaign, he expressed regret for some of the corrosive remarks that he has made since he launched his campaign in June 2015, and for "the personal pain" they may have caused, though he did not identify which ones.

“Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words, or say the wrong thing.

“I have done that, and believe it or not, I regret it,” he told supporters in a battleground state, one of the five where he will be concentrating his efforts under the changes in his campaign.

The Clinton camp dismissed it as “teleprompter regret”.

Three months ago, in an interview with one of those people he has repeatedly insulted, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, Trump showed that he did not really do regret (while at the same time grudgingly admitting he had some remorse). Looking back was not something he tended to do, he said: "I don't think that's good . . . I don't even think that's healthy."

Trump reverted to his old self in his speech on Thursday night when it came to attacking Clinton, showing that the brash New York billionaire will be turning the empathy spigot on and off over the remaining 80 days of this bizarre presidential campaign.