To be clear: Donald Trump is not Igor Stravinsky. And although, yes, he boasted about the size of his ding-dong in the middle of a televised debate (kick in that screen!), he’s not a Sex Pistol either. Nonetheless, with his followers—about whom one should not generalize, except to say that most of them would rather be waterboarded than sit through an episode of Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!—he has co-created a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock. He’s done it by harping on America’s most conservative intuitions—“chaos in our communities,” barbarians at the border—while addressing us in a style that thrillingly breaches every convention of political presentation. It’s as if the Sex Pistols were singing about law and order instead of anarchy, as if their chart-busting (banned) single, “God Save the Queen,” were not a foamingly sarcastic diatribe but a sincere pledge of fealty to the monarch. Electrifying!

Trump-space is not democratic. It depends for its energy on the tyrannical emanations of the man at its center, on the wattage of his big marmalade face and that dainty mobster thing he does with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. But it is artistic. Within its precincts, the most vicious and nihilistic utterances retain a kind of innocent levity: They sound half-funny, theatrical, or merely petulant. The scapegoating and bullying are somehow childlike. This is why, so far, no political strategy has succeeded against him. It rolls on, his power grab, his wild Trumpian trundling toward the White House, because he’s not doing politics at all. He’s doing bad art. Terrible art. He can’t go off message, because his message is “Look at me! I’m off message!”

Speaking on the hoof, in an emancipated, undogmatic way, is a fashion among today’s public figures: The loosey-goosey style of Pope Francis himself has been hailed by one of his closest counselors as “a pontificate of … incomplete thought.” But nothing comes close to Trump’s improv extravaganza, his unteleprompted lungings, his obscenity stampede, his rhetorical vagrancy. Trump’s speaking style is from the future, from a time to come when human consciousness has broken down into little floating atavistic splinters of subjectivity and superstition and jokes that aren’t really jokes. At times he is in chauvinist free fall, swiping and snarling at the phantoms around him. At others, pure psychic prima materia comes bubbling up in crude lumps, clinically fascinating, as when he fantasized that Megyn Kelly was exploding with menstrual blood.

There are nights when Trump, in his supreme orange confidence, is quite simply the worst stand-up comedian in the world, crashing and burning, really bombing, but fiercely applauded because with every misfiring bit and linguistic collapse he is sticking it to the enemy: the critics, the ironists, the middlebrows, the gentle teasers, the ideologues of taste, them. His people love to see this, to feel this happen. For the early punk bands, not being able to play their instruments was a mark of virtue—a blow against the elites, the puffy-haired technocrats with their pointless 12-minute guitar solos. In the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées it was noted that the pumped-up Stravinskyites “would applaud novelty at random simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes.” That’s what the laughter in Trump-space sounds like.