Trump’s attempt to unite party in disarray

Donald Trump and the Republican elite spent their convention in Cleveland trying to portray a picture of party unity. The past few days have delivered the exact opposite.

Senior Republicans have become increasingly concerned by Mr Trump’s erratic behaviour, his refusal to endorse the re-election bids of Paul Ryan and John McCain — two of the GOP’s most senior figures — and his insistence on prolonging a feud with the family of a fallen Muslim-American soldier.

Vin Weber, a lobbyist and former Republican congressman for Minnesota, told the Financial Times on Wednesday that Mr Trump posed an “enormous threat” both to the party and the country and that he would not vote for the property investor — although he stopped short of saying he would vote for Hillary Clinton.

“The whole world is rattled by this guy: they don’t know what to expect from him,” he said. “Instability in the world leads to bad consequences.”

Meg Whitman, the Hewlett-Packard chief executive and a significant GOP donor, this week said she would support Mrs Clinton over Mr Trump, as did Representative Richard Hanna, a New York congressman who declared Mr Trump “unfit to serve”.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former adviser to Mr McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said Mr Trump would lose “dramatically” if the election were held today and that he had only the narrowest of windows to win voters over. “This has been more a clown show than a campaign.”

On Tuesday Barack Obama urged GOP leaders to withdraw their endorsements of their candidate instead of simply denouncing his statements, as he took the unprecedented step of warning that Mr Trump is unfit to hold the office of president.

However, there is little incentive for GOP leaders to renounce Mr Trump formally, given that doing so would raise the question of whom they would vote for instead, Mr Holtz-Eakin said.

Mr Trump’s alliance with the GOP has always been a fragile one and a host of prominent party members, including Mitt Romney and the Bush family, stayed away from last month’s convention. However, with fewer than 100 days to go before the election, hopes that the property developer would run a more disciplined campaign focused on winning over undecided voters have foundered.

Mr Trump has ignored entreaties to cease his battle with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a Muslim-American captain killed in the Iraq war, after Mr Khan criticised the Republican candidate’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the US as unconstitutional.

A Republican party source said Mr Trump’s comments about the Khan family and his refusal to endorse Mr Ryan had left Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus furious. NBC News reported that Mr Priebus was among a handful of senior Republicans wanting to stage “an intervention” with Mr Trump, urging him to reset his campaign. The RNC declined to comment.

The growing disquiet among Republicans has come alongside polls showing Mrs Clinton building a lead nationally and in key swing states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. The former secretary of state has even been performing remarkably well in polls taken in traditionally right-leaning states, such as Arizona and Georgia where Republican candidates typically win by healthy margins.

Bill McInturff, a partner at Republican pollster Public Opinion Strategies, said polls released in recent days were helpful “but not yet predictive” of the state of this year’s presidential race.

“The large convention ‘bounce’ seems to be a thing of the past and the polls that will start coming out now after both conventions have been completed and in the new few weeks should provide a more reliable sense of the structure of the campaign,” he said.

Despite trailing in the polls there is still a chance Mr Trump could turn the race round, said pollster Frank Luntz.

Mr Trump has the highest negative ratings of any presidential candidate since 1936, Mr Luntz said, and turning his campaign round would mean a wholesale change in strategy, abandoning a pattern of personal attacks and embracing a discipline that he has not been able to show so far.

“She’s ahead, she’s clearly ahead. But she’s not so far ahead,” he said. Turning Mr Trump’s campaign around means “focusing on America, not specific Americans”, Mr Luntz said. “And it means leaving his ego at the door. He complains repeatedly that he is being attacked. For someone who is tough on everybody else he has a remarkably thin skin.”