Illustration by Tom Bachtell

The presumptive Presidential nominee of the Republican Party—let’s call him Donald Trump, though “Donald Trump” is more like it—has a way with words, after a fashion. The mouth moves and stuff comes out. (“That could be a Mexican plane up there. They’re getting ready to attack.”) Except when he reads from a teleprompter, the words paradoxically seem both calculated and careless. Trusting a G.P.S. all his own, Trump is most at ease wandering syntactically all over the map until he spots an off-ramp: “Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary,” “Goofy Elizabeth Warren,” “Build a Wall.” The result ain’t oratory. Still, the words entertain, wound, outrage, delight, bemuse, stupefy. More than a year into Trump’s candidacy, they also signify the speaker’s confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.

Throughout the primaries, Trump rallies routinely featured his boasts about the most recent polling results. In the absence of plausible policy specifics, a coherent philosophy, a regard for nuance, or an acknowledgment of the exigencies of governance, this ritual seemed an end in itself. From there, he would ramble on about China, winning, losing, Islamic terror, Muslims, Mexicans, bigness, something about something that must be true because he read it or heard it somewhere, the disgusting lying press, and, inevitably, his fantastic super-successful incredibly intelligent self. The faithful could never get enough. One can imagine George Orwell trapped in a sea of waving “Make America Great Again!” signs when he found the poetry to define the design of political language: “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

No one disputes that Trump is not a politician; he is a visionary salesman whose ingenious project, hatched while he was still in his twenties, was to brand and plaster himself everywhere. He started with the family business—real estate—and then expanded to casinos. Despite several bankruptcies, he continued to pursue myriad schemes that epitomized A. J. Liebling’s “man who mulcts another man of a dollar, or any fraction or multiple thereof.” Trump had long since chosen to reduce—or, in his calculation, surely, to inflate—himself to a persona: “Donald Trump.” Pivoting to Trump 2.0 likewise meant having no use for the intimacies and the self-examination inherent in personhood. The praise Trump elicits from voters for his “authenticity,” for “telling it like it is,” elides the fact that he is committed to hiding his human side from the world and, for that matter, from himself. “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see,” he confessed to one of his biographers, Michael D’Antonio.

After running even with Hillary Clinton or slightly ahead of her in polls published in mid-May, Trump has seen his numbers deteriorate with every demographic, a decline that correlates with the exertions of fine journalists who, freed from the distraction of the primary-season horse race, are doing Trump’s scrutinizing for him. Almost daily, the exposés accumulate: he doesn’t pay his bills, often stiffing small contractors; for a self-proclaimed multibillionaire, he gives amazingly little to charity; he has a long history of treating women like sex toys; he faces allegations concerning the highly dubious Trump University and the no less sleazy Trump Institute (a “wealth-creating secrets and strategies” seminar business).

Trump often speaks of how much “fun” he has running his business and running for President, but he plainly is having less of it lately. A man in touch with his emotions would recognize that in regard to this circumstance his emotions are mixed. One remarkable revelation was an account published online, in March, by Stephanie Cegielski, the former communications director of the Make America Great Again super pac. Cegielski told of being informed by colleagues, in March, 2015, that Trump would be running for President, with the goal of polling at, say, twelve per cent, and finishing second in the delegate count. (“A protest candidacy.”) Then, of course, his talent for demagoguery and his contempt for the establishment in both Washington and the Republican Party radically changed the narrative. The poor fellow wanted only to extend the “Donald Trump” brand, not to impose upon Donald Trump the task of learning the sorts of things that would require self-discipline commensurate with the awe-inspiring responsibilities of the Presidency.

A determined major-party candidate would have a staff employing hundreds of experienced operatives, an elaborate fund-raising network, a well-conceived ground game in every state, especially swing states. A recent headline in Politico read, “Trump’s Pennsylvania Campaign Is Missing in Action.” There were also reports that the Trump campaign was soliciting donations from politicians in Australia, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, and the United Kingdom—a violation of federal law. To be fair, at the beginning of June his campaign had only $1.3 million in the bank. So he needed the money.

No serious candidate would gratuitously pick a racially charged fight with a federal judge presiding over a lawsuit involving his private business. A man determined to win would equip himself with a research operation that could provide in-depth information on foreign- and domestic-policy issues. The day before the Brexit vote in the U.K., Trump was asked by Fox Business where he stood on the issue. “I don’t think anybody should listen to me, because I haven’t really focussed on it very much,” he said. “But my inclination would be to get out.” When he flew to Scotland the day after the vote, unaware that Scottish voters overwhelmingly wished to remain in the European Union, he tweeted, “Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!”

Actually, for Trump it is all a game, one in which, though this seems an odd way to characterize it, he has outsmarted himself fatally. He famously sleeps only four hours a night—sufficient, one assumes, to squeeze in a recurring nightmare of November 9th headlines screaming “loser!!” Vast evidence suggests that such a scenario is what he has dreaded most throughout his life. Still, the voters who support him will not be going anywhere. The resentment that he has exploited to win their votes will remain and grow, as it will among like-minded populists in Europe who feel overwhelmed by globalization and, especially, immigration. At some point, it will hit his followers that they’ve been sold out by a huckster who coveted their votes only for the sake of his colossal self-regard. And that, all along, he had nothing real to offer. ♦