COLUMBIA, S.C. — A growing chorus of top advisers to Donald Trump is urging him to fixate less on personal grievances and instead focus on hitting President Joe Biden and unifying the Republican Party.

The attempt to turn to broader themes comes as the campaign looks ahead to Super Tuesday and the general election, according to nine top Trump aides and allies who spoke to NBC News. Trump’s commanding win in South Carolina over Nikki Haley is yet another illustration of an undeniable political reality: Trump will be the GOP nominee.

There is no question that after Saturday there will be a pivot, because there needs to be,” said a top adviser to the former president. “There is a mindset from our perspective that she [Haley] can do whatever she wants. She can do whatever, we don’t care.”

Follow live updates in South Carolina here.

The adviser said the goal is to focus on bringing the Republican Party together after a fractious primary, but the person conceded that flashes of Trump’s trademark pugilistic style and tendency to go off-script, especially when discussing his growing legal woes, will stick around.

“We are not going to totally be able to move away from what is going on in his personal life,” the adviser said. “It’s going to be happening every day, and he is a fighter and will talk about it. Everyone understands that.”

While Trump retains a commanding lead in polling for the Republican race, a potential general election matchup with Biden — where voters may be less interested in his personal grievances — remains tight, according to NBC News polling.

That attempted pivot was evident in Trump’s South Carolina victory speech, which did not mention Haley once, took shots at Biden and openly touted a GOP unity message. It was a marked contrast to his speech in New Hampshire, when he repeatedly mocked Haley for losing and having a “very bad night.”

“There has never been a spirit like this,” Trump said Saturday night in South Carolina. “I have never seen the Republican Party so unified.”
Trump is notoriously hard to wrangle, and he rarely sticks to the script. It’s unclear whether he will be willing, or able, to carry out a reset.

But two people involved in conversations around the potential pivot said the topic has been under discussion in internal campaign deliberations. One of those people, who doubts Trump has the discipline to execute on it, said the idea is to make the campaign “more about issues and less about personality.”

Those advocating for Trump to home in on a less divisive message point to his speech after a dominating win in the Iowa caucuses as evidence that he is capable.

“Whether it’s Republican or Democrat, or liberal or conservative, it would be so nice if we could come together,” Trump told supporters in Des Moines after his caucus win.

Republican strategist David Urban, a Trump campaign adviser in 2016 and 2020, said that the Iowa speech should be the model moving forward — even if Trump has at times shown an inability to stick with that tone, such as in his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary in which he reverted to his combative style.

Urban said Trump’s Iowa speech was about “pivoting to the general election,” but “in New Hampshire, you saw a little bit of a distraction and more pugilism.”

“The former, rather than the latter, serves him better,” Urban said.

“Especially in this race where there is such a compare and contrast, Trump should take Biden at his own words: ‘Don’t compare me to the almighty; compare me to the alternative,’” Urban said. “Trump should compare his record to Biden’s record. … There was a sense that America was on the right track. Now there’s a sense that America’s on the wrong track.”