Byron York writes: FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Back when Donald Trump was giving one hour-plus, free-form, jazz-improvisation speeches — that is, for nearly all of the campaign until the last week — Trump spent an inordinate amount of time telling audiences how great he was. He was the best at this, the best at that, he won this, he won that, his companies were the greatest, people loved him. A typical Trump speech included long stretches of nearly nonstop bragging.
Like much else in the Trump campaign, that has changed dramatically in the last seven days. In his speech at the Fredericksburg Expo Center here Saturday night, Trump was virtually brag-free for all 42 minutes. There was nothing about how smart he is, or his fabulous lifestyle, or the club championships he has won. Trump was instead relentlessly on-message from start to finish.
There was something else missing from Trump’s Fredericksburg performance. The old Trump spent a lot of speech time bashing the press. He would point to reporters — whom his staff had penned up midway back in the hall — and tell the crowd how dishonest they were. He would accuse TV cameramen of refusing to turn their lenses toward the audience because they wanted to conceal how big the turnout was.
In Fredericksburg, there was none of that.
Instead, sticking close to a prepared text, Trump focused on a broad-based presentation of his agenda and sharp attacks on Hillary Clinton. And not much else.
Trump’s new campaign manager, pollster Kellyanne Conway, laid out the strategy in a series of media appearances after the recent campaign shakeup. “When he takes the case right to Hillary Clinton, he looks at it as a tennis match, lobbing, lobbing, lobbing at her, not picking a fight with the ref, not booing the crowd,” Conway said on MSNBC Thursday. “He focuses that way, he’s able to do two things: He’s able to be himself stylistically, he’s able to be Trump authentically, and yet he’s able to move this conversation into a general election contrast with Hillary Clinton.”
