Worried Republicans are pushing Donald Trump to tone it down, reset his campaign and focus on issues like the economy, but they’re not having much success convincing the former president to change.

“He doesn’t have message discipline,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said. “He’s long-winded, rambling, and kind of fuzzy. He’s getting a little more like your elderly parent or grandparent … (Kamala Harris) is on message and Trump isn’t.”

So should the former president change? His appeal is his bull in a china shop, straight-shooting, say-anything brand. He’s rough around the edges and calls it the way he sees it.

If he loses that edge it may not seem real.

“We’d much rather have an American president who is who he is, who’s willing to offend us, who’s willing to tell the truth, who isn’t a fake,” Trump running mate JD Vance said.

Now more than ever, Trump – under siege by Democrats launching personal attacks – needs to go to battle and turn it up.

He will look defeated if he tones it down. That’s what his critics want.

And forget about kowtowing to the media, that’s a lost cause. The media will never be behind Trump or treat him fairly.

Trump should also ignore the polls that show him slipping, and remember that all the polls eight years ago showed him losing badly.

But Republicans are panicking looking at the current polls showing Democratic nominee Harris surging, and using that to force Trump to change his strategy.

Former GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Trump should focus on policy and not personal attacks, warning that Republicans are not focused enough on Harris’s policies.

“I think if we’re able to say … ’Here are the policies that Kamala Harris has not only stood for in the past but that she has actually taken steps to implement…I think we can win this thing not only by a small margin, but still in something that resembles a landslide,” Ramaswamy told Politico.

Former rival Nikki Haley said Trump “needs to focus” – a suggestion the Trump campaign did not accept – and stop questioning Harris’s race and crowd sizes and calling her stupid.

“I want this campaign to win,” she said. “But the campaign is not going to win, talking about crowd sizes. It’s not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It’s not going to win talking about whether she is dumb. You can’t win on those things.”

And former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said her advice to Trump was “don’t wander off, don’t call (Harris) stupid and all kinds of names, stay on message.”

Another Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, said, “When Trump attacks Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris’s support among swing voters rises, particularly among women. It’s just a fact of life right now.”

Fact or not, Trump isn’t likely to change, so Republicans will have to embrace that.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris greets supporters at a campaign event at Hendrick Center for Automotive Excellence on the Scott Northern Wake Campus of Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, N.C., Friday. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)