Trump's allies are warning him to reboot his campaign. Trump is working on new nicknames for Joe Biden.

There's a divide in President Trump's re-election effort between advisers and allies who see the polling and are pushing for a major overhaul of the campaign, and those, including campaign manager Brad Parscale, who argue that the polls aren't as bad as they look and insist Trump's base is enthusiastically in line, The Washington Post reports. "And then there's Trump himself, who has derailed his team's desired themes on an almost daily basis — deploying racist rhetoric and mounting incendiary attacks on critics amid a surging coronavirus pandemic, an economic crisis, and roiling protests over police brutality."

"You can't win with these numbers. They're atrocious numbers," Ed Rollins, co-chairman of the pro-Trump super PAC Great America, told the Post. "He's got to go out and add 10 points pretty quick. If he can do that, he'll win. If not, [Joe] Biden is sitting there as the alternative." Another person close to Trump told the Post that "if the election was today, we are in big trouble," but "thankfully, it is not."

Parscale replied, "We know we are in solid shape in all of our key states, and no amount of fake, narrative-setting media polls can ever change that." Many Trump allies, similarly skeptical of public polling, "say the internal polling and modeling they're sharing with the president is less grim than the public surveys," the Post reports. Trump himself has been telling allies he believes his hard line on statue vandals will work to his political advantage and says "10 points" should be added to his numbers, two people who spoke with Trump this week told the Post.

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Advisers at least agree it's urgent for the campaign to make the race a choice between Trump and Biden, not a referendum on the incumbent. "Trump has recently been asking advisers whether he should stick with his current nickname for Biden — 'Sleepy Joe' — or try to coin another moniker, such as 'Swampy Joe' or 'Creepy Joe,'" the Post reports. "In a tweet on Sunday, Trump tried out yet another variant: 'Corrupt Joe.'"

For his part, Biden is comparing Trump's reaction to the multiple crises to "a child who can't believe this has happened to him." The COVID-19 pandemic "didn't happen to him," Biden said in Philadelphia on Thursday. "It happened to all of us. And his job isn't to whine about it. His job is to do something about it, to lead."