Gwenda Blair is author of The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire. An e-book edition of her book Donald Trump: Master Apprentice, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

Donald Trump’s scorched-earth approach to a single challenging debate question from Fox News' Megyn Kelly—one that another candidate probably would have (wisely) danced around and let drop—shouldn't be surprising to people who know him. His response is consistent with the man I came to know well myself while I was writing a book about the real estate empire built by Donald, his father and his grandfather. As he's done his whole life, no matter the issue, Trump went in for the kill against Kelly, and he gave no quarter.

He's still giving none. Indeed, the secret to Trump's entire career— and to understanding his continued popularity among Republicans, as well as whether he will ultimately self-destruct or survive as a campaigner—can be found in his initial response to Kelly at last week’s debate. When the Fox News host, clearly trying to be provocative, asked Trump whether calling women “fat pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs,” and “disgusting animals” at various times meant he had the wrong temperament to be president, Trump responded by saying the country was in too bad a state to bother with political correctness. He sarcastically added that he was sorry if she didn’t like what he said, and then he added a threat. “I’ve been nice to you,” Trump told Kelly, “but I could be not nice considering the way you’ve treated me.”


Trump delivered on that threat as soon as the debate ended. He declared that Kelly had “bombed” and was “unprofessional,” called her “totally overrated and angry,” and retweeted a post labeling her “a bimbo.” When his lawyer and close advisor Michael Cohen retweeted a comment on Kelly to the effect that “we can gut her,” the man who never stops talking said nary a word of reprimand. Nor did the passage of an entire weekend appear to generate a moment of self-reflection or regret on Trump’s part: On Monday morning, Trump brazenly told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” "She should really be apologizing to me, to tell the truth."

It's important to understand that what happened here had little to do with Trump’s attitude toward women per se, and everything to do with the Trump family history of turbocharging carpe diem—seizing every opportunity for gain, and doing everything possible to win.

For his grandfather Friedrich Trump (the name was originally spelled Drumpf), an immigrant from Germany, this meant exploiting the 1890s Klondike gold rush by offering food, liquor and women to miners in the Yukon; for his father, Fred, this meant using newly available government mortgage guarantees to finance the construction of thousands of homes and apartments in Brooklyn and Queens; and for Donald, it has meant using the power of modern branding techniques to make himself a juggernaut in luxury building, casino gambling and entertainment TV.

Throughout his childhood, his father urged his three sons to be tough—childhood friends remember the older man’s injunction to be “killers”—and Donald was his best pupil. Winning has always been what matters most, and he has devoted his life to making sure he comes out on top. His father’s mantra was never, ever give up, and Donald was raised on the gospel according to Norman Vincent Peale, the family minister and author of "The Power Of Positive Thinking," the midcentury best-seller that combined worldliness and godliness into a practical-minded theology that encouraged self-promotion and valued success,

So Cleveland and its aftermath was, for Donald, just another short chapter in a long life story—the art of the kill, if you will. It was definitely a not-nice performance—and, at first glance, something of a surprise, at least to me. While I was writing my book, and when I updated it to include Donald’s expansion into television with "The Apprentice," he was unfailingly courteous to me. At the Trump Organization, he has a long history of giving women executive roles in management, marketing and strategic planning. “They are doing a phenomenal job,” he told ABC over the weekend. “They make money for me. They make money for themselves.”

Then again, there’s no denying that he’s said a lot of boorish and chauvinistic things about women. He has been notably not-nice to his first two wives. He discarded Ivana, the mother of his first three children, with a stingy-looking settlement amid a highly publicized squabble about his then-mistress, Marla Maples. During business meetings, he told associates that Maples, who became his second wife and the mother of his fourth child, had “nice tits, no brains,” and he later tossed her overboard with an even smaller settlement.

But it would be a mistake to write Trump off at this point, as many pundits are already doing, as a mere buffoon tripped up by his arrogance and crudeness—especially since polls taken after the debate show that he appears to have been hurt very little by his remarks. T he latest NBC News Online Poll—conducted from Friday evening (a day after the debate) into Saturday—showed Trump still leading the list of GOP candidates among potential Republican primary voters by a wide margin.

A master salesman, Trump is highly skilled at reading what people want—not what they say they want, but what they actually want—and he has delivered many times in the past. Thus, for example, when he first tried his hand at luxury construction in Manhattan in the mid-1970s, the conventional wisdom held that the rich preferred understated, old-style buildings that didn’t broadcast the wealth of residents. He saw that there were plenty of monied buyers who wanted not to hide their wealth but to flaunt it, and he went on to make his fortune by creating the brassy, mirrored, attention-grabbing world they longed to be part of. Similarly, in Atlantic City, he built huge, shiny casinos designed for a clientele for whom the glitzier, the better. And on “The Apprentice,” he leveraged the eagerness of young people to be part of this Trump-branded world to make himself an international megastar.

It’s a transactional world, where the sole standard is winning or losing and the usual labels—liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, pro-choice or pro-life—are put on and cast off as the situation requires. And in the process, Trump, who was born rich, is now even more rich, and lives in a 53-room triplex apartment crammed with marble and onyx and gilt-covered furniture and crystal chandeliers, has managed to put himself across as a regular guy who happens to be a winner and is simply straddling the top of the regular-guy pile.

Now he has a new audience—disaffected, alienated Americans who feel their lives are going nowhere, and are looking for people and forces to blame. They long for someone dedicated to helping them get the respect and prosperity they feel they deserve—and with his bluntness toward everyone, his refusal to spare even the ordinarily sacrosanct, military vets, and, yes, even women, Trump is a highly appealing option.

And Trump is listening. He’s still not interested in “political correctness,” though some might consider the issue at hand, when it comes to his language about women, to be more one of simple decency and manners.

How does Trump get away with the kind of language he uses—to defy the law of ordinary behavioral gravity? The answer may be that he is nonstop, like a carnival barker; Trump goes back and forth across the line of acceptable language so often that people inevitably listen only selectively. He’s contradictory, not to mention constantly self-inflating, but he’s also seamless and endless in his streams of invective, and his audience emerges simultaneously lulled, charged up and inured to what he has actually said.

He also constantly dares to tread where no one else will go. Like the other Republican candidates, Trump is going after the usual suspects—elites, illegal immigrants, the media, Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular. But he’s not stopping there. He lets loose on politicians in general—or “stupid people,” as he likes to say—the culprits whom dissatisfied voters hold most accountable for their plight. Hence his attack on John McCain, his swipes at other Republican candidates (using language as harsh as the things he’s said about Kelly), and his continual insistence that he’s not a politician but a businessman whose willingness to go after anyone and everyone who stands in his way is proof positive that he can get the job done.

All of it, together, has seemed to work. He could have swatted away Kelly and her verbal potshots with his reference to political correctness and vague nonapology. But after appointing himself the new sheriff in town, he couldn’t do anything that hinted at backing down. Instead he tossed down a warning and launched a series of highly charged remarks, culminating on Friday with an intimation to CNN that the reason for Kelly’s behavior was that she was having her period. Although he subsequently denied that he had meant any such thing and that only “a deviant” or “a sick person” would think so—he was “an excellent student,” “is a smart person,” and would never make such “a stupid statement”—his words caused conservative commentator Erick Erickson, host for a highly publicized conservative candidate forum in Atlanta, to rescind his invitation to the developer.

Now, once again, the supposed political experts are saying Trump’s a goner. They say he lost the Hispanic vote, he lost the military vote and now he’s lost the woman vote. They could be right; the attack on Kelly wasn’t pretty, and his pivot from being pro-choice to being pro-life could be a problem given that the latest Gallup poll shows the majority of Americans are pro-choice.

And yet.

He has tapped into a deep vein of anger and resentment, and his insistence that his wealth leaves him free to fight for the little guy—and, presumably, the little gal—continues to gain traction. Obviously, this raises the question of whether or not the man who has made his fortune by using other people’s money for his projects would actually plow that same fortune into a political campaign—and whether, if he did so, it would be enough to pay for the enormous advertising budget such a campaign would presumably entail.

But this is a campaign like no other. Instead of courting the support of the Republican Party, he is telling its movers and shakers to take a hike. Instead of steering his way around controversy, he has detonated it. Instead of testing the waters in primary states with advertising, he has refused to spend one penny on it.

And so far—early on, to be sure—he is still dominating the pack. The one candidate with name recognition anywhere close to Trump’s is Jeb Bush, and he seems to be fading by the minute. What if Trump simply relies on the branding he’s already done?

Maybe, possibly, the unthinkable is becoming just barely thinkable—a candidate who obtains the GOP nomination with minimal or no financial investment, a situation that would force the Republican Party to pay for the actual campaign.

There are many dangers in such a scenario. Perhaps the most pressing for Trump is that this makes it impossible for him ever to escape notice, ever to avoid doubling down, even when it would be to his advantage. And at the moment, that is how things appear to stand in his dispute with Kelly.

It’s one thing to be the winner because of being the strongest guy in the room; that’s something millions of Americans, perhaps enough to elect a president, deeply admire. But it’s another thing to be a bully. That’s something Americans don’t like, don’t respect, and won’t vote for. And with his behavior toward Kelly, he is drifting away from the former and closer to the latter.

Which one will Donald Trump ultimately turn out to be? Can he moderate the habits of a lifetime to win the nomination? Stay tuned.