Donald Trump rose against all odds to clinch the Republican ticket for a chance to fly the contest in the general elections. Interestingly, Trump personifies everything that could be wrong with a presidential candidate – he is loud, brash, egoistic, vain, and prone to being misunderstood because of a consistent mismatch between his intentions and his expressions.

Yesterday, Trump posted a tweet saying, “I will be making a major speech on ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION on Wednesday in the GREAT State of Arizona. Big crowds, looking for a larger venue.”  Wednesday is around the corner and I won’t be surprised if Trump comes out to make a massive shift in his immigration policy. The Trump campaign team has prevailed on the man to start using a teleprompter; at least, his mouth won’t get him into any more troubles than it already has.

The Republican camp apparently thinks that it is doing a great job of making the man to drop some of his extremist views. Yet, adopting moderate views might do the Trump candidacy more harm than good.

Trump attempts a pivot without pivoting

One of the key selling points of Trump’s candidacy during the primaries was his promise to send ALL 11 million undocumented immigrants packing. I can quote Trump saying, “I promise you from the first day in office — the first thing I am going to do — the first piece of paper, the first piece of paper that I’m going to sign is we’re going to get rid of these people, day one, before the wall, before anything.”

In the last couple of weeks, the media have been up Trump’s neck to lay out his plan for dealing with those 11 million undocumented immigrants.  Trump notes that he is under pressure to lay out his immigration policy in a speech that he gave in Iowa over the weekend. He said, “All the media wants to talk about is the 11 million people.”  However, the Trump camp has revealed that the businessman turned politician will reveal his blueprint for dealing with undocumented immigrants on Wednesday.

The issue however is that I don’t expect Trump to come out with a well-formulated plan to deal with undocumented immigrants. To start with, Trump has started changing the wordings of his anti-immigrant views. While speaking in Iowa, Trump changed the rhetoric from deporting “undocumented immigrants” to deporting “criminal immigrants”. He said, “On day one, I’m going to begin swiftly removing criminal illegal immigrants from this country”.

Is Trump his losing himself by being moderate?

Trump’s shift from deporting all illegal immigrants to deporting criminal immigrants is just one of the many changes that the man has made in his original stances. I don’t even want to dwell on how difficult with would be logistically and legally to identify “criminal” immigrants. More so, separating and deporting “criminal immigrants” might be full of many legal grey areas you won’t have to deal with if you wanted to deport all illegal immigrants.

Nonetheless, the change from the hard extremist views to a soft and moderate view might sound like a smart move politically; but, it might not work for Trump because Trump is not the typical politician. His supporters love him because he says the things that they want to ear – the only problem is that the votes of his core supporters might not be enough to get him into the White House.

However, Trump is backing down on his views but he his apologizing without actually apologizing. It is doubtful that Trump’s newfound love for moderate views will endear him to his core Republican base and neither will he get the votes of his sworn enemies in the democratic base.

Trump can’t ride the middle lane into the White House

Irrespective of what democrats and “white educated republicans” thought about Trump during the primaries, Trump appealed to the primal instincts of a large swath of the electorate especially among conservatives and nationalists.

I honestly think that Republicans are not really serious about winning the election; otherwise, they wouldn’t have fielded a largely divisive candidate as Trump.

But I digress…

Now, the Republicans think that the brash loud-mouthed nature that helped Trump to win the primaries will not get him into the White House. If anything, his brash nature has alienated him from some of his original supporters and from many undecided voters who were not originally comfortable with either Trump or Clinton.

Trump is trying to endear many of the voters he has alienated but his campaign has a difficult job ahead. Trump might lose his popularity with his core supporters if he makes a pivot on some of the key selling points of his campaign.