It’s fashionable to dismiss all politicians as equally disappointing, unprincipled or simply venal. Since the system is gridlocked and out of touch, surely that means they’re all just as bad as each other.

But amid the wreckage of the political class, Donald Trump is different – and not just because of his politics or his rhetoric. He is in a class of his own, taking narcissism and amorality to a whole new level.

You don’t need a trove of leaked emails to understand just how different Donald is. You just need to get to know the Trump Foundation a little better. Thanks to the dogged reporting of the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, we can do just that. It’s not pretty reading.

Trump and his supposedly charitable works are a grotesque distortion of philanthropy, a word whose roots come from the Greek for loving people. Judging from his philanthropy, Trump mostly loves one person, whose name just happens to be Donald.

Instead of donating to a foundation with any meaningful purpose, Trump invested in his favorite pastime: inflating his self-image. This is his life’s work, whether it’s the Trump brand of business, politics or charity. The product is the same: an artificial version of Donald Trump.

Take the 1997 story of when he was principal of a Bronx public school for a day. It was a cute program designed to boost struggling schools in New York City, and the supposedly wealthy property developer delighted in the scene.

The school chess team was holding a bake sale to raise $5,000 to pay for travel to go to a tournament. Trump handed them a fake million-dollar bill. After making them the butt of his joke, Trump wrote them a real check for just $200.

What kind of person mocks the students he is supposed to be helping?

A man who shows up uninvited, a year earlier, to the opening of a nursery school for children with HIV/Aids. Trump sat on stage, pretending to be a donor, when he had given nothing. Not a penny. He posed for photos alongside then mayor Rudy Giuliani and the developer who actually donated generously to build the school. Then he simply drove away, having done nothing.

That’s Donald Trump. The man whose charitable foundation buys giant portraits of himself to hang in his own golf resort.

The Post called more than 400 charities with some connection to Trump. It found just one gift from Trump in the past eight years: to the Police Athletic League of New York City, for less than $10,000.

Trump’s charity would not matter if he didn’t brag about it so much. The scrutiny began when he skipped a primary debate as part of his petty feud with Fox News, staging a fundraiser for veterans instead. Trump promised to give $1m to the cause, but the money only materialized after months of media questions.

For all his boasting about his foundation, most of the money came from outside donors, not from Trump himself.

Normally you’d say this kind of man has no shame. It’s true: and that’s exactly how Trump has managed to get to be the Republican nominee for president of the United States of America.

Shameless is the way he won the primaries. Where other candidates were mildly restrained in their Muslim-baiting and nativist nightmares, Trump could always take things beyond the extreme. No previously elected official could trash Mexico and demand payment for a border wall.

Shameless is the way he has conducted himself as a nominee. He has picked fights with a Gold Star family and promised to lock up his political rival without due process. He has praised Russia while attacking his opponent for supposedly jeopardizing national security.

And it turns out that a good chunk of Republicans like his shamelessness. They confuse his rule-breaking for the kind of free spirit that will reform a broken system.

A real reform candidate could have won this election in a landslide. A self-disciplined extremist could have rallied the disaffected masses to his candidacy.

But Trump is no reformer and he has no self-discipline. He abused the tax system to convert corporate losses into personal tax benefits. Then he accused his rival of failing to stop his tax avoidance, when she actually voted to close the very loophole that he has exploited.

Like the scrutiny of his foundation, the long IRS audits he suffers are entirely of his own making. Trump will no doubt cast such investigations as political revenge, long after this election is over.

For now, Trump is like the arch villain of a dozen superhero movies: the more he is attacked, the stronger he gets. The only solution is the kryptonite of election defeat, because with it comes the ultimate public rejection.

No matter how much the national polls fluctuate, the state-by-state polls represent a disaster for Trump. States that he needs to win such as Virginia and Pennsylvania are out of reach. States he needs to defend, such as North Carolina, remain in jeopardy. States that Republicans haven’t needed to defend in decades, such as Georgia and Utah, are vulnerable.

There is only one refuge left for a man like Donald Trump: the shameless undermining of the democratic process itself. He will challenge the election and its results. He will stir up conspiracies of fraudulent votes and rigged elections. He will delegitimize this country’s political leaders in ways that will make Vladimir Putin very happy.

And he will walk away from the disaffected voters who believed his promise that he would win so much they would get bored of winning.

Because he’s shameless.