I wrote about the semi-Kempification of Trump that Ramesh alludes to for Politico today:
Trump’s turn is an implicit acknowledgment that the Republican Party can’t just be a Trump party and hope to win. It has to have broader reach than working-class whites, and avoid positions and rhetoric that convince people already inclined to believe such things that the GOP is thoughtless and retrograde. In other words, the party needs the likes of Paul Ryan—so scorned by Trump allies—who has invested the time in coming up with a serious anti-poverty policy agenda.
If Trump loses, one of the tragedies of the campaign will have been that a more populist Republicanism could, in theory, have won over working-class voters of all races. This is something that should have been a focus of the campaign many pivots ago, if not when Trump first descended his escalator.