When a candidate who fills his speeches with boasting has little left to boast about, he’s left with many minutes to fill. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RAEDLE / GETTY

The speech that Donald Trump gave on Wednesday in Daytona Beach, Florida, was not his most menacing or self-destructive, but, like many of his recent public addresses, it was confusing. Trump gave a distracted account of the Saudi intervention in Yemen that did not come to a point: “So they’re fighting, for Yemen, back and forth.” He said he saw a documentary showing that the U.S. Air Force was using such old equipment that it was raiding museums for spare parts. When speaking about a payment that the government made to Iran in January, he claimed to have seen a video of piles of cash being unloaded from a plane in Tehran. The video was shot from the “perfect angle, nice and steady,” Trump said, warming to his story. Later, his campaign explained that Trump was speaking about footage of Americans who had been held hostage by Iran leaving a plane in Geneva, which had accompanied a Fox News report about the payment coinciding with their release. That was the part of the speech that made the news. But there were plenty of other pieces of conjecture, stories that broke off, and lines of thought that seemed to amble off into the distance. Even the most obvious political arguments tended not to reach a point. “If Hillary puts her people on the Supreme Court,” Trump told his supporters, “like, who knows?”

The past week has been so devastating for Trump that it has been tempting to find a theory to explain why his pattern of gaffes has gotten so much worse. Since early in the campaign, the candidate has been said to suffer from the Red Queen hypothesis: each time he says something outrageous to win media attention, it raises the bar for how outrageous his next statement has to be. But to watch Trump carefully over the past few weeks has been to notice a separate pattern, both deeper and more mundane. Trump has a dead-air problem. He spends so many hours speaking before audiences. But he has so little to say.

The American political stump speech is a highly specific form. At its best, it is about twenty minutes long, and thematically taut. Candidates begin by describing a local endeavor that illustrates a broader national challenge. (“I'm here in Pittsburgh to talk about nanotechnology, and how we're going to grow our economy!”) They emphasize the urgency of the challenge, telling the stories of ordinary people who are stymied or suffering. The argument is that bad policy has been responsible for this suffering, and that good policy can end it. The candidates describe their own history, or at least their party’s history, of solving this kind of problem. There is often some gesture toward enduring national values (“The trees in Michigan are exactly the right height!”), and then the candidates suggest that the solution will begin with the listeners themselves: with their decency, their hard work, and, above all, their votes.

This form has severe limitations, but one saving virtue is that a conventional candidate, placed before an audience, almost always has something to say. Trump, however, does not. He has no political record to describe and no inclination to describe his party’s record. He does not recount the suffering of ordinary individuals because he has not met many of them. He does not have a deep understanding of the Obama Administration’s policies, and he has few policies of his own to explain. After he disastrously attacked the family of Humayun Khan, who was killed in action, in Iraq, the Republican Senator Roy Blunt, of Missouri, released a statement with his “advice” for Trump: to continue to “focus on jobs and national security and stop responding to every criticism whether its from a grieving family or Hillary Clinton.” But Trump does this in almost every speech: he talks about China stealing American jobs, about the threat of ISIS, and about the wall he intends to build along the Mexican border. That still leaves many, many minutes to fill.

Trump’s most obvious problem is that he speaks for so long, usually about an hour. For months, he filled the time with boasts and grievances, the boasts having mostly to do with his success in the polls. But now there is less to boast about; the polls look uniformly bad for him. In Daytona Beach, Trump gave them about a minute and moved on. “Trump used to spend 50% of message on polls,” the Republican consultant Michael Shannon pointed out on Twitter. “Now he has to fill that space. And it’s with things like Khans, fire marshals and babies.”

Those aren’t his only subjects, of course. It was telling that the video he imagined originated in a Fox News report. Cable news is Trump’s content-generation system; its controversies fill his podium hours. But, when the running cable-news controversy is about Trump himself, it has a way of trapping the candidate. Of course he chose to argue with Khizr Khan. What else would he talk about? In a way, that is the question for the ninety-five days until the election. In the long arc of the campaign, that is not so many days. But it is an awful lot of minutes to fill.