This strikes me as a bit out of left field one day before the election. In an interview with local ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington, DC, President Trump was asked if there were any regrets, things he wishes he could “just take back and redo” as he approaches two years in office.

“Well, there would be certain things,” Trump said. He continued, “I’m not sure I want to reveal all of them but I would say tone. I would like to have a much softer tone. I feel, to a certain extent, I have no choice, but maybe I do and maybe I could have been softer from that standpoint.”

"I'm not sure I want to reveal all of them," – Pres. Trump when asked what he personally regrets doing during his time in office. However, he does admit one item to me during our 1-on-1 interview. #ElectionEve #ElectionDay #Midterms2018 @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/IBeG48js96

— Scott Thuman (@ScottThuman) November 5, 2018

I guess the point here is to show that he’s open to a softer tone, at least in theory. That’s a 180-degree turn from what he said just over a week ago about possibly toning his rhetoric up rather than down. I’m not sure what the point of the reversal is supposed to be. Are there really any Democrats out there who might be listening to this message on the eve of the election? I sort of doubt it. The left is all in on racism and fear-mongering as their closing message. It’s their replacement for collusion which seems to have been mostly forgotten in the past couple of months. So I guess I don’t see the upside of Trump signaling compromise with the party that wants to burn him at the stake. In fact, there’s so little upside here that I can only conclude these are Trump’s genuine feelings on the matter, at least they are today.

While I don’t see an upside to this, I do see a downside. CNN has been running chyrons since Cesar Sayoc was caught about Trump’s reluctance to take responsibility for “inciting [the] serial bomber.” While I don’t think Trump is admitting guilt here, it’s not hard to see how the left is going to weave this into their existing narrative about the right’s problematic tone. Some lefty columnist is probably already working on a story to be headlined “Trump belatedly agrees his tone is to blame.” Honestly, some of his critics are so far past that at this point that it might not matter.

In the same interview, Trump was asked specifically about his tone on immigration and whether that was fear-mongering or racism. Trump replied, “It’s not racism. It’s just that people have to come into our country legally otherwise you don’t have a country.” Here’s that clip.

Does Pres. Trump worry about racism growing…as a result of his tough talk on #Immigration ? A small clip from our 1-on-1. #ElectionEve #ElectionDay2018 #Midterms2018 pic.twitter.com/lQAYkXI1cu

— Scott Thuman (@ScottThuman) November 5, 2018

I think a softer tone would help Trump in many situations but, frankly, the well of this particular national conversation has been poisoned so many times by the shoddy behavior of the left-wing media that it’s hard to even imagine a discussion which doesn’t begin and end with “Republicans guilty.”