Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Monday, Oct. 24, 2016, in Tampa, Fla.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
A different sort of Donald Trump, more disciplined and given to momentary bouts of self-control, made short but noticeable appearances between the angry slogans as the Republican presidential candidate crossed Florida in a crucial eleventh-hour campaign tour Monday.
There were more messages of hope and salvation mixed in with the angry accusations. There was a multipoint plan for the first 100 days of his presidency, albeit one given over to cancelling Barack Obama's legislation and deporting undesirable people. And, most startling, there was no mention of the sexual-assault allegations levelled against him by 11 women so far and his oft-repeated desire to take legal revenge on his accusers.
For some of the 15,000 people who came to his rally Tuesday night in Tampa – an evenly split city in a crucial voter-packed swing state – this was a welcome change.
"It's a really different tone than the other rallies I've been at – he's being more disciplined and you can tell he's listening to people telling him to calm down and be less angry," said Bailey Ingersoll, 18, who first saw Mr. Trump at a rant-filled February rally here. She said she's now decided, after three rallies, to vote for him, in part because he's stopped talking about taking revenge against women, and is devoting less of his rallies to elaborate conspiracy theories.
But only so much less. A Donald Trump rally, despite momentary asides to a national TV audience, is still largely dominated by crowd-pleasing slogans of revenge and racial intolerance, farfetched allegations of criminality and elaborate vote-stealing plots involving Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her colleagues, and digressions into baroque conspiracy narratives that seem comprehensible only to Mr. Trump.
The two political claims that first brought him to international attention – a promise to build a gigantic wall along the Mexican border and somehow force Mexico to pay for it, and a pledge to ban Muslims from entering the United States – have returned to the foreground of his speeches with a vengeance.
"Who's going to pay for the wall?" he shouted, and the crowd roared "Mexico!" He replied: "One hundred per cent."
Such crowd-pleasing exchanges, immensely appealing to people at his rallies and evidently satisfying to Mr. Trump, continue to dominate his message. By far the largest part of his Florida rallies was devoted to his twin claims that Ms. Clinton is a criminal and that the polling system and the election itself are fraudulent.
Much of his rally material is now drawn from allegations contained in the e-mails hacked from Democratic Party operatives – notably key Clinton official John Podesta – by Russian authorities and leaked by the increasingly pro-Trump organization Wikileaks.
"John Podesta has rigged the election polls by oversampling – a well-known voter-suppression technique," he claimed in Tampa. While Mr. Podesta, who ran a think tank and advises Ms. Clinton, has nothing to do with polling organizations, and oversampling is a technique used by polling firms to correct for sampling inaccuracies rather than amplify them, the argument allowed him to claim that he is in fact on the verge of winning the presidency, even though Monday's polls by major firms showed him between five and 13 percentage points behind Ms. Clinton nationally.
While no there is no credible support for the claim that either the polls or the elections are "rigged" – a claim Mr. Trump made seven times during one minute of his Naples, Fla., speech Monday afternoon – it does go over well with voters at rallies, who see him as an outsider pitting himself against an entrenched and self-satisfied political establishment.
"I was sort of the ultimate insider," he told the crowd in Naples, and then, by declaring his candidacy last year, "I became an outsider like they've never seen before in their life."
Delivering a moderate message to the many swing voters of Florida is certainly crucial to any chance Mr. Trump has of winning the presidency. Even the narrowest win in Florida will deliver 29 of the 270 electoral-college votes needed to win the presidency; Barack Obama and George W. Bush would have lost if not for thin Florida victories (in Mr. Bush's case, only because the Supreme Court barred a 537-vote recount from proceeding).
Ms. Clinton currently leads by a few percentage points in Florida, and is holding rallies in many of the same Florida locations as Mr. Trump this week (she will be in the same Tampa stadium on Wednesday). Mr. Trump, in trying to appear calm and presidential while retaining his angry-outsider image, seems to have launched a final gamble in his improbably presidential journey.