On campaign financing, Trump’s message is basic: I am financing myself, so you can trust me to protect you because I will be beholden to no one other than the people who elected me. You can’t trust these other guys to protect you, no matter how good what they say might sound, because they will protect whoever paid for their campaigns. The other candidates, having pledged allegiance to the ideology of Citizens United, have no response and avoid the topic.

Trump’s signature policy is to build a wall to protect his voters’ jobs. What could evoke protection more than building a huge wall? His opponents quibbled about its feasibility but ultimately adopted the same position. Trump’s message to voters: I care about protecting you enough to propose huge historic projects. The other candidates begrudgingly agreed, but their heart is not in it, so they are less likely to follow through.

Free trade is great, Trump says, but it has to be fair. His opponents just adhere to pure free trade, which does increase the economic pie. But economic research shows that free trade harms some subsets of voters, particularly the working-class voters flocking to Trump. The message to his voters: I will favor free trade only to the extent that I can protect you from harm, perhaps by compensating you using the gains of trade. My opponents will favor free trade even if it harms you.

Much the same goes for taxes and entitlements. Trump says he will cut taxes but not cut Medicare and Social Security, while the others favor cutting both. His message to voters: Only I value protecting your retirement benefits over tax cuts.

Trump stresses how much he wants to spend on the military to keep Americans safe. But he loudly criticizes the Iraq War for costing many lives and dollars while making the world more dangerous, and he argues against repeating the mistake in Syria. The other candidates gasp, because he is violating the conservative ideology that the Iraq War was a noble cause, albeit misinformed, and they advocate further noble but bellicose strategies in Syria and elsewhere. Trump’s message to voters: I will use the military to protect us; the other candidates will use the military to advance ideological views about military honor, even if that sacrifices the lives of many of our soldiers for no discernible benefit.

Trump even challenged the gospel of 9/11. In conservative ideology, 9/11 was a time of noble suffering, and all George W. Bush can get is credit for keeping us safe after it. Trump stresses instead that Bush didn’t keep thousands from dying on 9/11. The message: Honoring the fallen is no excuse for failing to protect us in the first place. Protection beats ideology, every time.

The same message pervades his style. Trump talks endlessly about his polls, because the polls stress that he is strong enough to protect his voters. He speaks extemporaneously and often crassly in a stream-of-consciousness way, which has many pitfalls but emphasizes that his views are unprepared, authentic statements of his views and that he will thus carry out his promises to protect his audience. He responds aggressively to every attack, no matter how minor, conveying the sense that he will also aggressively protect his voters.