I’m going to present you with two numbers, and I want to see if you can guess why they explain how Donald Trump might truly become the next president of the United States.

Are you ready?

O.K., here goes.

The first number is 51. The second number is 90.

Go on, guess—I’ll wait.

Can’t figure it out? The first number, 51, was George W. Bush’s approval rating on September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks on the World Trade Center that killed 2,996 people and injured more than 6,000 others. It was also, notably, the lowest rating of Bush’s presidency to that date.

The second number, 90, represents Bush’s approval rating two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. It was, and remains, the highest rating of any sitting president since Gallup began issuing its polls more than 80 years ago.

Fifteen years later, national support for Donald Trump is hovering around 41 percent. But, you can bet that if any significant national-security threat is posed between now and November, Trump’s poll numbers will soar in the same way that Bush’s did in 2001. And if that happens, God forbid, I’m willing to bet that he may be the next president of the United States.

Trump, it’s clear, seems to understand this reality. In fact, he appears to view it as a political opportunity. He has found a way to conflate an actual attack with the mere threat of one. After declaring that he “would bomb the SHIT out of” of ISIS, or articulating that “when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump recently went on National Border Patrol Council’s Green Line radio show and claimed that refugees entering the United States will launch a massive terrorist attack against America. “Bad things will happen—a lot of bad things will happen,” Trump said. “There will be attacks that you wouldn’t believe.”

Trump’s strategy, it’s worth noting, is underpinned by a relatively facile understanding of another set of numbers. The first of these is one week; the other is less than one second. During World War II, it took, on average, about a week for film footage of battles to make it from the European theater of war to American movie theaters. Today, live footage of anything, from a candidate’s remarks on live television, to a bomb exploding in Iraq, can make it around the world in less than a second. When Trump attacks ISIS, his verbiage proliferates globally in an instant, stoking hatred among infidels and fear among voters.

Hillary Clinton is actually far more hawkish than Trump on foreign policy matters. But Trump understands that in today’s fickle technological age, what a politician has said in the past doesn’t really matter. It’s what you say in the moment that does. Trump, unlike Clinton, seems to comprehend that a 51 percent approval rating can quickly become a 90 percent approbation. He also seems to realize that the poll numbers we’ve relied on to guide us through an election cycle have now been broken by technology, too.

In Silicon Valley, disruptive companies like to say that their industry is broken and they are the ones who can fix it. Uber, for instance, capitalized on a well-known fact that the taxi system was inoperable. Airbnb wanted to reimagine the arcane hotel industry. Blogs recognized that newspapers and magazines took too long to get the news out. And yet it appears that the polling systems we’ve used in the past no longer work as well as they once did.