His mouth drops down and forms a slightly elongated oval, like a stretched Cheerio. The oval is a prelude to a taunt or a threat. PHOTOGRAPH BY DARREN MCCOLLESTER / GETTY

In public, Donald Trump has three facial expressions—no more than three because life, for him, is quite simple.

Implacable Resolution: The increasingly familiar chin-up, narrow-eyed Mussolini frown. When Trump listens to a hostile question, his lips are closed, his head squares up to a solid block of orange clay, his corn-silk hair surges resolutely forward and backward at the same time. Expressionless, he nods as the hostile sentence is delivered. By evoking Mussolini’s thrusting chin, I don’t mean to imply that Trump is eager to become a military dictator. He isn’t. Donald Trump is something classically American, an unwavering what’s-in-it-for-me capitalist who likes to crush other people. Yet Mussolini and Trump share something: They appeal to an appreciation, even love, of overwhelming ego strength and extreme machismo, however crass in expression—in fact, the crasser and more preposterous the better (shame doesn’t exist for some public men). Those who are drawn to such strength nestle under it. The hero releases his aggression on the world, the aggression that others would be punished for; his ability to get away with belligerence, insults, lies, and threats makes it easier for his audience to accept caution and silence for themselves. He has triumphed for them, and that’s more than enough.

Trump’s emotional appeal is similar to that of gangsters everywhere, who act out our most violent and anarchic impulses. In a variant interpretation, Elspeth Reeve, at The New Republic, compared Trump not to a gangster but to the “heel” in pro-wrestling matches—the bad guy whose boasts and offensive behavior and barbarian facial hair are part of a ritual that audiences love. But that isn’t quite right. Professional wrestling is scripted, and Trump is spontaneous and improvisatory. In wrestling, the bad guy always loses, and Trump always wins. He is impervious and unremitting. If he says something stupid, he denies he said it—for instance, his suggestion that Megyn Kelly’s tough questions in the recent Fox-hosted Republican debate were produced by menstruation. Trump went to Wharton, he built a great business, he’s intelligent, so how could he have said it? He didn’t say it. His audience loves him not in spite of such “gaffes” as slamming John McCain’s war record; they love him because he says such things. The senselessness of the McCain attack was essential to its popularity. Trump’s speeches and press conferences are a free-association shambles, his “ideas” a series of boasts. When asked, on Tuesday, how he would bring jobs back from China, he talked about buying a hotel in Miami. For his audience, the only thing that matters is that he asserts himself. Reasoning and consistency are élitist weaknesses.

Beneath Contempt. His mouth drops down and forms a slightly elongated oval, like a stretched Cheerio. The oval is a prelude to a taunt or a threat. When Kelly asked Trump about his derogatory comments on women, he responded, “What I say is what I say. And honestly, Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.” But he would do it, and continued to do it. Donald Trump has made a shrewd estimate of the distaste, in a part of the Republican base, for virtue or high-mindedness or public spiritedness of any sort—what he dismisses as “political correctness.” Such sentiments are for “losers” who don’t understand that winning is the only thing; they are “stupid.” Obama’s mild reasonableness is particularly enraging to members of the Republican base because they suspect the President is outclassing them. Trump releases them from that fear.

You-gotta-be-kidding-me. A wide smile, eyes often closed, palms outstretched. In such moments, Trump presents himself as capitalist man, the spirit of rational calculation. Only an idiot could fail to see that he’s right. When asked by Bret Baier, in the debate, about his past support for Hillary Clinton, Trump responded, “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.” So his own behavior is part of a corrupt system. The important point for him is not the degradation of representative democracy, but only that Trump gets what he wants. Having won, he can laugh at his own cynicism.

Trump’s manner is the product of business calculation. But many Americans may not realize how much Trump’s voice and gestures are also shaped by New York—the old, hard New York, before gay rights, smoothies, and Brooklyn, the New York that Trump and I grew up in. His temperament is the residue of a thousand wise-guy tabloid columns, the knowing talk of Seventh-Avenue machers and Irish taxi drivers and mobbed-up guys in the outer boroughs. The flavor of it was there, harmlessly, in the lather-and-hot-towels midtown barber shops of my youth, with their uniformed women attending to gents’ cuticles; benevolently, in the incomparable Broadway musical “Guys and Dolls”; and viciously, in the A.M.-radio rat-a-tat of Walter Winchell. Men like Trump always cut to the chase because, for them, there’s nothing but the chase; they cite the bottom line because it’s the only line that matters; they put down women because there’s no reason, most of the time, to take them seriously. If a woman somehow does attain power, they assume she will use it to destroy men. In Megyn Kelly, Trump sees some golden-haired modern variant of Medusa.

People are constantly surprised and shocked by Trump because he doesn’t play by any known set of political rules. Even the three formidable Fox moderators (including Chris Wallace) were limited in their understanding of him by what they expected of political candidates—acknowledgment of some minimal level of consistency, plausibility, and accountability. They thought they could trip him up, even trap him, Tim Russert-style, in his contradictions and political changes. But he answered them with gibberish—silly jokes, non sequiturs, and irrelevant assertions. It’s impossible for Trump to contradict himself, since, as many have said, he has no beliefs, in the sense of ideological beliefs.

He exploited the country’s bankruptcy laws when his hotel-casino investments in Atlantic City went sour, and anyway, he got out early and made a lot of money. Got it? He made money. A single-payer system, often known as socialized medicine, “works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you’re talking about here.” (i.e., fifteen years ago). Got it? It works. But the Affordable Care Act, which could be seen as a hesitant first step toward a single-payer system, “is a disaster.” You can’t argue with reasoning like this because it always circles back to Trump’s triumphs over the naïve. He’s gone past contradiction, beyond tautology, into infallibility. In advance of the debate, he stopped studying policy papers. He doesn’t need answers; his temperament is the answer. My guess is that he will persist as long as he’s having fun, not spending much of his own money, and enjoying high poll numbers. Which could be right into the primaries next winter. The Republican Party and the media can’t begin to understand him until they look at his face.