The GOP nominee prefers his KFC by the bucket, devours the fries before the Big Mac, and only eats greens out of taco bowls perched atop white linen napkins — but make no mistake, these are Donald Trump’s salad days.

Counted down in the dark days after his gloomy Cleveland convention, with polls showing him behind by double digits, Trump has mounted what, to the unschooled political observer, appears to be a remarkable comeback. He’s pulled even with Clinton among likely voters in the latest New York Times/CBS national poll — a 42 to 42 percent deadlock that has been reflected in a raft of tightening battleground state polls. And he’s surged to an 8-point lead in Iowa, reflecting his improvement in critical battleground states.


Still, the story of the past three weeks is less about a Trump comeback than a Hillary Clinton fallback, and the same head-scratching dynamic that defined the Republican primaries — Trump’s Teflon, his opponent (in this case Hillary) is Velcro — took root in August.

And there are warning signs aplenty for a candidate whose trajectory has improved only by his capacity to drag his opponent down to his own level of septic-tank unpopularity. And Trump’s early fall “surge” could be quickly reversed as he descends ever deeper into the darkening swamp of national self-hatred this rotten, hope-free, soul-sucking 2016 campaign for president has turned out to be.

Here are five things Trump should worry about as he enjoys his resurgence.

1. Everything has gone Trump’s way — and he’s still not ahead. If 2012 was all about the 47 percent, this year — at least for Trump — is defined by the 44 percent. In poll after poll after poll — during the good times and bad, the most disliked politician in the country can never rise (with a few outliers) beyond the 38 to 44 percent range among likely voters (he typically tops out at 42 among registered voters). In a normal year, numbers such as these are in a statistical range political consultants like to call “the Killing Field.”

Clinton’s decision to lay low in August (a time when Trump dumped his Man from Ukraine Paul Manafort and hired the competent professional Kellyanne Conway) will be debated for years. If she wins, her summertime fundraising blitz, meant to unleash a torrent of anti-Trump advertising at campaign’s end, will be regarded as strategic genius; lose and her decision is up there with Michael Dukakis in the tank. But the bigger point: Even with Trump’s nifty new telepromptered campaign, even with Clinton’s paranoia-will-destroy-her decision-making (i.e. covering up her own pneumonia) — Trump isn’t doing particularly well. “True to form, he’s underperforming any other Republican candidate in his position,” said a GOP operative who is publicly backing the reality-star-turned-politician. “He’s just now starting to crack Mitt Romney levels, and everything has gone right for him, including an on-camera face-plant by his opponent.”

There’s little doubt that Trump’s chances are improving — and his once impossible Electoral College path to the White House seems decidedly less so today, especially with New Hampshire emerging as a surprise tossup and Ohio, a natural stronghold for him, slipping away from Clinton. But she’s still holding on to small but stubborn leads in the firewall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota — and has already effectively taken once-purple Colorado and Virginia off the Trump map.

But he is still underperforming Romney and even John McCain in states where he’s leading (As Vox points out, Trump’s 45 percent in Ohio is a few clicks lower than any recent Republican).

Trump allies will rightly point out that Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 with only 43 percent — and they are right, except for the fact that Ross Perot drew 19 percent as the best-funded third-party candidate in modern history. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, seems to be helping Trump (whom Johnson loathes) by siphoning off support from Clinton, but he’s having a hard time cracking double-digits and isn’t likely to hit the 15 percent necessary to get him into the debates.

In this space last week, I posited that Clinton’s September stumble was a result of her decision to hammer at Trump’s weaknesses at the expense of defining her own strengths and likability. The same holds true for him — but much, much more so; his improvement has come as a result of her degradation — her own missteps and his “Crooked Hillary” branding has helped drive her negatives from the low 50s to the mid-high 50s, Trump territory.

But unlike Trump, Clinton has edged above the magic 50 percent level in national and state polls. And until he can come close to that level — when there’s a succession of credible national polling showing him hitting 46, 47 or 48 percent — then the fundamental dynamic of the race hasn't really shifted. Until then, it’s all churn, clamor and horse race.

2. The cable and TV networks are going to vet Trump like he might actually be president of the United States. This one is wishful thinking based on zero evidence. Move along.

3. Trump is getting cocky again. Trump’s steely messaging team has done a great job duct-taping the boss’s maw since taking over in mid-August. But Trump’s mouth, like LeBron James, is a cosmic force that can merely be contained for limited periods, and never truly shut down — and Trump’s recent success has rekindled the suppressed I-gotta-be-me impulse.

The trouble with Trump (and in this way he closely resembles the tea party/Liberty Caucus wing of the party he hijacked) is that he’s just as interested in self-expression as he is in winning. That’s not to say, of course, he doesn’t want to win (or more, to the point, he doesn’t want to be a “loser”), and he’s nothing if not a quick learner. But existentially, Trump is convinced that his own genius is the vehicle of his success, and his recent prosperity is loosening his dangerous tongue and unraveling the New Donald narrative pushed by the cable chatterers.

He can’t help himself. After a few days of dignified silence on Clinton’s on-camera near-swoon, he told a rally Wednesday night just how strong he was (despite failing to release a detailed medical report, as promised — apart from handing Dr. Oz a one-page note from the doctor who wrote him a fake note a few months back). "You think this is easy? In this beautiful room that is 122 degrees," Trump told a crowd in Ohio — although reporters noted that the arena was perfectly cool. "It is hot and it is always hot when I perform, because the crowds are so big, these rooms were not designed for this kind of crowd.”

Then there was the matter of his daughter Ivanka — the most poised and presentable member of the Trump family —hanging up on a reporter. Oh, and son Donald Jr. told a Philly TV station that if Republicans played as dirty as Democrats, “They’d be warming up the gas chambers” for the GOP — not exactly on-message for a campaign accused of playing footsy with white supremacists.

4. Terrified Democrats are Clinton’s secret weapon. This is the big one, the factor upon which the election truly hinges. Raw, small-mammal fear. Trump’s success might be the only thing that gets many Democrats (or anti-Trump moderates outside the party) to hold their noses and vote Hillary.

The wow in recent national polls is not Trump’s rise, but the fact that more Trump voters are psyched about their candidate than Democrats are jazzed about their less-than-exciting nominee. In the Times survey, 51 percent of Trump supporters were enthusiastic about him vs. 43 percent of Clinton supporters who were thrilled about her. But fear is as powerful an emotion as love in politics (it’s why negative ads work and the decision by Jeb Bush’s super PAC to dump tens of millions into positive ads was so bad) — and Democrats are panicking, in a way that could be good news for their underperforming nominee.

Ultimately, Trump Terror has been at the core of Clinton’s strategy since the end of the primary, and it’s why her comment about half of Trump supporters being in a “basket of deplorables” probably won’t do any long-term damage: It’s basically still a base election, and she needs to get them out to win. A more vexing problem is her continued meh performance with younger voters who are flirting in the 25 to 30 percent range with third-party candidates.

The endgame strategy, here, in a quote: I ran into a top adviser to Clinton at a social event earlier this week, and asked him how things were going. “How the hell do you think it’s going? We’re probably going to win, but there’s a 30- to 40 percent chance we are going to elect a f---ing madman for the White House.” Then the guy headed for the bar.

5. Gary Johnson? Really? Very, very few Clinton voters are leeching directly over to Donald Trump — but a substantial number are visiting the pot-loving, socially liberal, bean-bag decorated Libertarian halfway house run by 2016’s chilliest third-party candidate, Gary Johnson. Johnson is a smart, iconoclastic critic of both candidates who has been making a broad pitch for Bernie Sanders’ supporters, and it now appears he’s drawing skeptical former Clinton supporters in substantial enough numbers to affect the race.

Clinton’s Brooklyn brain trust is in a quandary on dealing with this: Attack him, and Clinton allies have compiled oppo files on the former New Mexico governor, and raise his low profile; let him roam the firmament snatching up progressives in his VW van and lose votes.

Fortunately for Clinton’s team, support for Johnson seems relatively soft (as opposed to the smaller, but more militant following attracted by Green Party candidate Jill Stein), and Clinton’s team expects many to drift back to her cause, as third-party defectors often do in October and November.

Barring an unexpected Johnson boomlet, this will be their anti-Johnson strategy — claiming that a vote for the mild-mannered Libertarian is, in fact, a vote for President Trump.

That might work.

Just ask Al Gore, who made the same case against Ralph Nader in 2000.