The G.O.P. Waits, and Waits, for Donald Trump to Grow Up

Republicans on both sides of the Trump Divide are waiting for things that will never happen.

The party establishment — including donors who should be writing big checks by now, experienced operatives who should be competing for top spots on the campaign, and Republican leaders who should be hammering out state-by-state victory plans — is waiting for Donald Trump to stop acting like Donald Trump.

It’s abundantly clear, however, that a move toward statesmanship will never materialize. The latest example: Mr. Trump’s salesman in chief performance in Scotland, hours after the Brexit vote. “You know, when the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry,” he said, seeing a silver lining for the golf course he owns there.

Just a few weeks from the national convention, Republicans are stuck in these awkward standoffs that have come to embody everything that is uncomfortable and disorienting about this election: Our voters, in decisive numbers, picked a guy who embarrasses us.

Party leaders have watched the last eight weeks of the Trump candidacy the way you experience a chase scene in a dream where your legs never move fast enough to outrun the three-headed dragon on roller skates.

The cruel cycle of rooting for Mr. Trump goes something like this: The terrible press that follows his scandal of the week strengthens the hand of the advisers in Mr. Trump’s family and inner circle who appeal to his competitive streak. They persuade him to finally stick to a script and become a normal candidate for the presidency who delivers a speech like the one on trade that he delivered in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. We are lulled into a false sense of calm when he takes a break from his incessant intraparty trash-talking and racially divisive rhetoric. But just as one scandal ebbs and Mr. Trump appears primed to stick to a single message for an entire news cycle, he veers off course with an unscripted utterance on a morning news program.

If he were able to take a break from attacking his former opponents or other Republican leaders, he might accomplish his stated goal of uniting the party, although he has also declared that he’ll go it alone if he can’t bring the party along. The party would like to be brought along. Books will be written about what the much-maligned party establishment should have done and could have done to ward off Mr. Trump’s nomination. But the truth is that he won decisively because he speaks directly and plainly to the anxieties that the Republican base feels. He deserves credit for acknowledging their economic despair and mounting fears about Islamic extremism.

The problem with Mr. Trump’s campaign lies in the solutions he proposes — a lurch toward the isolationism, protectionism and nativism that President George W. Bush worried about when he faced difficulty mustering support for trade pacts, immigration reform and war in the Middle East.


And the problem with the party’s waiting game is that it replaces the sorts of activities that a fully functioning campaign should be doing. Before he flew to Scotland last week, Mr. Trump delivered a professionally written speech from a teleprompter criticizing Mrs. Clinton. A campaign firing on all cylinders would have then flooded the battleground states with events by surrogates — Republican governors and senators who could echo his message in the local news media. It would also have announced paid advertising and appearances in crucial states. Not a trip to a Scottish golf course. Mr. Trump managed to stay off the TV programs that often send him wildly off message, but the speech wasn’t followed by any sustained strategy to reinforce the case he laid out against Hillary Clinton.

In fact, most of the would-be surrogates have been too busy rebuking Mr. Trump for his post-Orlando dalliance with conspiracy theories and his attacks on a federal judge he deemed to be biased against him to take part in a strategy session.

Even being Trump surrogates probably causes them enough concern. They’re probably worried that the swing voters they are counting on to return them to the House or Senate will be turned off by a candidate at the top of the ticket who disparages women, mocks disabled people and pokes fun at prisoners of war for getting captured in the first place. It counts as progress at this point that party leaders have not had any reason to condemn a Trump statement for at least seven days.

For his part, Mr. Trump is waiting for respect. He believes he deserves the party’s admiration for his political achievements, his success as a businessman and his potential to transform and broaden the party’s appeal. He is brand new at the business of politics, and he vanquished the aspirations of 16 accomplished rivals in less time than it took Hillary Clinton to shake off Bernie Sanders. Mr. Trump is waiting for party leaders to stop reprimanding him for his lean (that is, skeletal) campaign operation, his politically incorrect utterances and his inconsistent positions. You can almost see him in his office in Trump Tower turning to Chris Christie, whom he’s come to rely on at moments of crisis, and saying: “Chris, what gives with these hand-wringers? Don’t they want to win?”

He also seems to be waiting for the news media to realize that the joke is on them. He manipulates many in the media, stroking their egos by offering enormous access, long phone calls to reporters and frequent appearances on his favorite television programs. While it annoys Mr. Trump to be criticized, he understands what Sarah Palin understood — his supporters are rooting for him, not the talking heads on TV. So when pundits count him down or out, his fans defend their guy against the arrogant members of the “rigged” media, whom Mr. Trump lovingly describes as “among the most dishonest I have ever met.”

Those in Mr. Trump’s inner circle are waiting for the political conversation to turn to events that they believe will determine the outcome of the election: the vice-presidential pick, the conventions and the debates. Governor Christie, who has been given the vital behind-the-scenes assignment of head of the presidential transition, points out that even a politically weakened Mr. Trump still bests his Democratic opponent in a recent poll on questions about trustworthiness, fixing Washington and fighting terrorism.

To that end, his advisers are waiting for their candidate to recognize that learning just a few more things about national security and counterterrorism might reverse his June nose-dive. Even polls in battleground states taken during what has been Mr. Trump’s worst month in his bid for president show that he’s neck-and-neck with Mrs. Clinton on questions about who can better protect the country. Those advisers must be waiting for the night when Mr. Trump goes to bed with a copy of “The Looming Tower” instead of his iPhone and Twitter feed.

As I recall all too well from my dating days, waiting for a man to change is a fool’s errand, but in the case of Mr. Trump, it may be the fools’ only choice.

Nicolle Wallace, an political analyst for NBC and the author, most recently, of the novel “Madam President,” was a senior adviser to the 2008 John McCain presidential campaign and White House communications director for George W. Bush.