I remember the heady days of the Trump primary campaign. Everything seemed possible for His Orangeness The Donald. Cherished assumptions about presentation, temperament and the dynamics of Presidential politics were unceremoniously rent asunder, the chattering classes thrown out and their tawdry rags cast after them. We were living in the Era of Trump now. Post-factual, post-partisan, post-consistency and logic. It reminded me of nothing so much as a cut-price Cultural Revolution put together by a team of door to door steak-knife salesmen.  The only necessary element remaining in the campaign appeared to be the candidate himself, gesticulating wildly and spouting a word-salad of meaningless cliche and innuendo with breathtaking rapidity.

Some, like yours truly, attempted to apply some sort of schema in the hopeless task of comprehending the coming apocalypse. Early polls had been a very, very poor predictor of primary performance in previous cycles. So i comforted myself and others, assuring them he would be a mere flash in the pan. Oh we were giddy fools my friends.

Now that i have finished and digested the large helping of crow thrust in front of me after his primary victory, i can look with some satisfaction on events. Because, dear reader, the Age of Trump seems to have been and gone. And there was much rejoicing.

The theory was that nobody really cared what Trump said. Voters didn’t vote on policy, they voted on image and temperament. Trumps image was one of strength we were told, and his temperament was that of a mighty eagle with terrible hair, crushing its squishy and salmon-like Liberal prey in its unbreakable talons. I told them he could not win a general election, and they would reply that he could pivot till his hearts content without consequence. The media had already savaged him as best they could to no avail, so who would enforce any kind of consistency upon this savage beast? Trump will just start saying a whole bunch of moderate things come the General Election campaign. It will be like all this never happened.

This theory is currently experiencing some problems. If the theory was a train the train would have caught fire, derailed and sunk into a swamp. Service is now suspended. It will not be making any  further scheduled stops.

I wish i could say it was something to do with the Clinton campaigns masterful strategy, but really it is all down to trump once again. Like the biblical Joshua, he surrounded the fortress, gave a great shout and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. Unfortunately, Trump did it to his own city this time.

We know Trump reads polls. He talks about them constantly. So it should not surprise us that the recent collapse in his electoral fortunes has caused ructions in the House of Trump. A few months ago the campaign fired Corey Lewandowski, the man previously responsible for running what was rather optimistically called the ‘trump campaign’.  To try and rein him back some way towards both Republican orthodoxy and the reality of modern professional political practice Paul Manafort was installed in Lewandowski’s place.

Now Manafort too has been unceremoniously dumped. He has been replaced by former Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon. I could write a whole post on what i think of Breitbart (not much) and Bannon in particular. At one point i probably will, but at this juncture it will suffice to say he is not a ‘catch more bees with honey’ kind of guy. But Bannon isn’t really the problem.

The problem is thus: Can trump actually moderate himself and appeal to more centrist General Election voters?

I’m inclined to say no. There is simply no evidence of this, and it undermines the whole concept of the Trump campaign. Its about attitude. He doesn’t say what is true, he is ‘truthy’. Its an attribute he possesses, not a description of the content of his multitudinous speakings.  He does not speak the truth, he says what he wants to say, what he thinks is true. To start to censor himself, to bow to such mortal preconditions as reasonableness and honesty, would be antithetical to the entire edifice of Trumpism. The sort of authenticity as a substitute for actual knowledge or understanding message can’t survive any hint of contrivance. Or else he is just a politician. And if he is just a politician, he is an incredibly bad one.

That is why i don’t see the much talked about ‘pivot’ working, or even being seriously attempted. Trump is riding the tiger, and he dare not get off for fear it will turn on him and devour him wholesale. One Republican has been quoted saying the campaign reshuffle amounts to re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic. Mike Murphy, an alumni of the Jeb Bush campaign, said of the Trump ‘reset’ that ‘It’s unlikely. Like, my Labrador could walk up to the piano and start playing. Not going to bet on it. Trump is Trump’.

This reminds me of the last cycle. A memo was leaked from the Romney campaign joking that they wanted to fire a staff member. ‘He works on the top floor, and his name is Mitt’, they said. No quantity of ‘top-tier operatives’, as the Trump campaign seems determined to call them, can compensate for a candidate who will simply not stop slashing wildly at his nose to spite his face.

Since the convention he has picked a fight wirh the parents of a highly decorated deceased war veteran, doubled down on calling an American judge Mexican in an unmistakably pejorative way and committed a host of other easily exploitable errors. And now he has picked a fight with virtually the entire media, including the usual GOP cheerleaders over at Fox News. There is an old saying in politics: Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Make no mistake, the repeated scandals are starting to bite. It seems very clear now that the strategy that worked in the primary with the small and demographically unrepresentative Republican electorate in a crowded field is cutting very little ice with the wider populace.

In another concerning development for Trump, he is getting a smaller percentage of the media coverage. Previously his weakness on paid media (ads he runs with money) was offset by dominating ‘earned media’ (news coverage you don’t have to pay for). As Clinton gets more and more press, this advantage is beginning to slip away.

So can the metaphorical leopard change its spots in this instance? I am extremely doubtful. I’m not even sure this particular leopard understand what spots are, much less what they should be. And with so much of Trump’s wit and wisdom already baked in to the collective consciousness by now it is hard to see how perceptions could be easily reversed.