WASHINGTON – Supporters of Republican Donald Trump urged him to
get back on message on Thursday after a week of dropping opinion poll numbers
and a war of words with ranking Republicans over his U.S. presidential
campaign.

Trump pledged to focus more on Democratic candidate Hillary
Clinton, who emerged from last week’s Democratic National Convention with a
lead in the polls and who has been consistently attacking Trump as
temperamentally unfit for the presidency.

Since formally accepting the Republican nomination two weeks
ago, Trump has not been able to keep the focus on Clinton. In the past week he
has gotten bogged down in a public spat with the parents of an American soldier
killed in Iraq.

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, who has
endorsed Trump but has not received a reciprocal endorsement from the New York
businessman in his re-election bid, told WTAQ radio host Jerry Bader in Green
Bay, Wisconsin, that Trump has “had a pretty strange run since the
convention.”

“You would think we ought to be focusing on Hillary
Clinton, on all of her deficiencies. She is such a weak candidate that one
would think we’d be on offense against Hillary Clinton, and it is distressing
that that’s not what we’re talking about these days,” he said.

Michael Caputo, a former Trump adviser who still supports him,
said Trump still has time to right the ship.

“Staying on message is absolutely key,” Caputo told
Reuters. “After 30 years of speaking his mind, Mr. Trump has to understand
that the general election for president of the United States is all about
staying on message.”

Trump supporter Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who ran
unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination, said Trump realized
the need to focus on Clinton.

“And I think you’re going to see him focusing much more on
the issues and on his opponent, and not allowing himself to be dragged off into
the bushes,” Carson told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Trump’s rough patch has contributed to a dip in support in some
battleground states. A WBUR/MassINC poll in New Hampshire showed Clinton
leading Trump, 47 percent to 32 percent.

Other polls showed Trump down 11 percentage points to Clinton in
Pennsylvania and 6 percentage points in Florida, two states that are important
to his chances of winning the election.

Trump told CBS 12, a Daytona Beach, Florida, TV station, on
Wednesday that “the campaign is doing really well” and he vowed,
“We’re going to focus more on Hillary Clinton.”

Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort told CBS’s “This
Morning” that the campaign is comfortable where it stands now and said the
news media have built a false narrative in which Democrats are controlling the
race to the Nov. 8 election.

Manafort said that Trump’s dropping poll numbers “were expected”
and that he expected the numbers to even out soon.

“The framework of this election favors Donald Trump. If we run
the campaign that we plan on running, we think we’re going to win. We don’t
plan on winning in August, we plan on winning in November,” he said.

Concern about Trump was spilling into at least one congressional
race.

U.S. Representative Mike Coffman, a Colorado Republican, has
released a campaign ad in his own re-election race promising to “stand up” to
Trump if Trump is elected.

“People ask me, ‘What do you think about Trump?’ Honestly, I
don’t care for him much. And I certainly don’t trust Hillary,” Coffman
said in the ad.

U.S. Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican,
told MSNBC he could not endorse Trump because of “all these unforced
errors” that Trump is making.

“It just seems that he’s, at times, hell-bent on losing a
very winnable election to a very seriously flawed candidate – Hillary
Clinton,” Dent said.

In another development, Trump’s wife, Slovenian-born Melania
Trump, responded to questions that have been raised about her immigration
status when she came to the United States in 1996.

“Let
me set the record straight: I have at all times been in compliance with the
immigration laws of this country. Period,” she said in a post on Twitter.