The exchange was similar to one I reported three months ago, in which Donald Trump Jr. told an adviser to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio that a Vice President Kasich would effectively run both foreign and domestic policy while President Trump was busy “making America great again.” (Trump’s son later denied making such an offer, though Kasich and a second aide have confirmed that the conversation took place.) It also was in line with Trump farming out the work of drawing up a list of potential Supreme Court nominees to the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. The list of 11 jurists the conservative organizations gave him last spring was, I’m told by a Trump confidante, accepted without Trump asking a single question about the names on it.

This lack of concern for the fine print, or even the not-so-fine kind, has always been one of the most divisive features of Trump’s now-embattled candidacy, refreshing to his supporters and appalling to most everyone else. Immediately following the third debate, a CNN/ORC poll found that by a margin of 59 to 35, people found that Clinton was better prepared to handle the presidency than Trump. For all of his authoritarian impulses, Trump has sent signals that in the increasingly unlikely event of his election next month, his would be the most outsourced presidency in recent memory. His disinterest in policy intricacies was evident in all three debates.

But it’s not even clear whether Trump would find the overall experience of being the nation’s chief executive all that interesting. On a plane ride back from a campaign stop in Buffalo this April, Trump volunteered to me that what would interest him most as president, “other than jobs,” would be “dealing with foreign leaders. I really look forward to doing that.” Creating jobs and negotiating with his counterparts are, arguably, the two skills Trump would be bringing from his experience as a developer. Other than building a wall — another throwback, perhaps, to the brick-and-mortar pursuits of his prior life — it has been difficult to imagine much else that would animate a President Trump.

Trump’s defenders maintain that as president he would be a big-picture chief executive who delegates the grubby mechanics of governance to like-minded professionals from the private sector. That argument might be more persuasive if professionalism were the hallmark of Trump’s campaign operation. Because it isn’t, the odds that we will ever get to see which executive model would prevail in a Trump administration are fast shrinking.

Unsurprisingly, Trump and his team continue to profess to see a path to victory, albeit one that sidesteps scientific polling, data-driven outreach and other reality-based tactics of the political trade. The sentiment in Trump Tower is that Trump is still in the game because he has already achieved the impossible. After all, as Trump’s longest-serving advisers argue, he should never have trounced the field in New Hampshire, where door-to-door supplication of the local residents — not Trump-style jetting in and out for large rallies — is the tried-and-true tradition. A rich Yankee with an unconcealable big-city accent and only a grudging genuflection toward religion should never have carried so many states in the South. The experts, surveying one of the strongest fields of conventional Republican contenders in years, proclaimed Trump had as good a chance of playing in the N.B.A. finals as getting the nomination. So why believe the experts now, after Trump has spent the past 18 months making them look like losers? Why trust any of the old rules? Instead, why not trust Trump?