The trouble with Donald Trump is not, as Jeb Bush and others would have it, that he's not a true conservative from any perspective. The trouble with Trump is not that his policy positions on immigration, ISIS, health care, Social Security, or whatever don't stand up to a moment of casual scrutiny. That we're even talking about his “positions” means that we've already progressed to the dangerous Stage Two of the Trump phenomenon, as if his stated views are the standard by which Trump ought to be judged—a huge victory for him right there. The trouble with Trump is that he is, by temperament, by experience, and by character, utterly unqualified to be president of the United States. He is a buffoon. That's why his campaign is a joke, not the merits or otherwise of his alleged policies. All he brings to the table is a lot of money and a talent for publicity. These are not worthless assets in a presidential candidate. Trump is right, unfortunately, that his billions free him from the need to raise money, with all the dispiriting and time-consuming compromises that that entails. And, of course, he is not the first politician with a knack for drawing attention to himself.

But he may be the first who offers little more than that. Oh, a bit of wit and charm. A sense of humor that always leaves the listener wondering whether he's serious or not. But where's the wisdom? Where's the gravitas—or, as the Brits call it, less pretentiously, the “bottom”? Trump's self-designated role in our culture has been the clown who, because he doesn't give a damn, will say anything, including truths that more serious people will not utter. That's fine. I wouldn't mind having that job. But Trump is apparently tired of playing the Fool. He wants to be King Lear.

The press is so hostile to Trump that it has broken new ground in what reporters are allowed to say in ostensibly “objective” news articles and broadcasts. Even Richard Nixon, the man who kept an “enemies list” that included reporters he was going to get even with, was treated with more respect. But every insult from the hated media just makes Trump stronger.

A news article in The New York Times—not an op-ed piece, a news article—about Trump's immigration remarks dignifies them with the word “plan,” even while describing them as “mixing a little policy with a lot of fiery bombast” and pointing out that his plan is based on ideas that have been “broadly debunked.” Pretty tough. (And accurate.) But the truth is that Trump has no “plan” for anything. He just has a mouth.

A while back in the Times, Josh Barro started a debate about whether Trump is really a “moderate” who merely acts like an extremist because it sells. You might say that he isn't an extremist but he plays one on TV. Barro's argument was that if you take all of Trump's extreme views on Social Security, immigration, and so on, some of them classified as extremely right-wing and some extremely left-wing, they average out to be more or less down the center. Ezra Klein replied in Vox, essentially, that extreme views are extreme views, no matter how they average out. But looking for some kind of ideological thread in Trump's various positions is a fool's errand (and another victory for Trump). The appeal of Trump's alleged views on every issue is their extremeness. That, and their seeming simplicity. The fact that he hasn't thought them through and has more or less pulled them out of the air (or out of his ass, as Trump himself might put it) is a feature, not a bug, as they say in Silicon Valley. Trump stands for the proposition that you don't need to know much to run the government. You just need to use your common sense and to grow a pair, as Sarah Palin so memorably advised.