WHEREVER the eye falls in Donald Trump’s Manhattan office, on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, there is Trump. Images of the tycoon glower from walls plastered with covers of Playboy, GQ, Newsweek and more. Piles of campaign literature—“Trump—Make America Great Again!”—jostle with stacks of more recent Trump-fronted publications on a desk so packed as to recall a dentist’s waiting room. A mound of Trump-covered copies of The Economist has pride of place: “I put you up front,” he says solicitously.

The pride Mr Trump takes in such self-aggrandising trumpery is almost touching. His Aladdin’s cave of celebrity puff, which doubles as the headquarters of a presidential campaign and large property company, is sufficiently eccentric to recall why his candidacy, announced at Trump Tower last June, was at first ridiculed. He looked like a chancer—a reality television star, with no serious political experience, who had changed his political stripes at least four times. Yet Mr Trump’s victory in Indiana on May 3rd (see article) has made him the presumptive Republican nominee. His remaining opponents, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich, have quit the race. He was for far too long underestimated. The same must not be said of the threat his egomania and pernicious nativism represents to America and the world.

His electoral success is founded on espousing a view of America both exceptionally bleak and widely shared. Two-thirds of Americans think the economy is rigged in favour of the rich; almost seven in ten believe their politicians don’t care about ordinary Americans. It is not hard to see why. Until the recent fall in the oil price, median real wages had been stagnant for over a decade. Between 2007 and 2014 the wages of many workers declined; the lowest-paid, struggling to adapt to falling demand for low-skilled factory labour, have been especially hard-hit. America’s infrastructure is crumbling. Its Middle Eastern policy has seen wars waged across the region. Terrorism—though it claimed fewer American lives last year than toddlers with guns—has become a national bogeyman.

Strange but not a stranger

Mr Trump inflates and conflates these problems into an absurd caricature of undiluted failure and decline. “We’re like a third-world country,” he laments. America “makes the worst trade deals ever made in the history of trade…We’ve spent $4 trillion in the Middle East and we’re in far worse shape than we were before…China, it doesn’t respect us.” He must believe some of this; his opposition to free trade is long-standing. Yet his miserabilism is plainly tactical. It gives him opportunity to throw a few popular scapegoats to his despondent supporters: job-stealing illegal immigrants—including the “rapist” Mexicans he denounced when he launched his campaign; factory-killing Chinese trade negotiators, whom he accused this week of “raping” America; “incompetent” and “crooked” politicians.

His success, in short, is based on inviting the most exaggeratedly down-in-the-mouth Americans to indulge their meanest instincts. To attend a Trump rally, as hundreds of thousands of Americans now have, is to participate in a ritual enactment of injury and vengeance; an enactment which has, on occasion, done real harm.

As when two thugs in Boston who had beaten a homeless Hispanic man with an iron bar quoted Mr Trump to the police in justification; as when an aged Trump supporter in North Carolina assaulted a protester after, in Las Vegas, Mr Trump himself had screamed “I’d like to punch him in the face!” over the cries of another such. Or as in Virginia, when a Trump rally, interrupted by protesters from the group Black Lives Matter, appeared to totter on the brink of a race riot. It is probably only a matter of time before one of the journalists Mr Trump keeps caged up at the back of the rallies gets badly beaten. One of his party tricks is to insult them—“some of the most dishonest people in the world”—and invite his crowds to jeer. From the cage, as opposed to the privacy of his Manhattan office, where Mr Trump is immensely charming, he does not seem solicitous. He seems threatening and vile.

Some commentators say he is a fascist—an idea he encouraged by inviting his followers to pledge their allegiance to him with a fascist-style salute at a rally in Florida. This seems like an exaggeration, however, and, given his hunger for a grievance, self-defeating. There is, similarly, no reason to suppose he is racist, as many have. But a significant minority of his supporters are—17% of them consider ethnic diversity bad for America, a strikingly high number—and Mr Trump’s dog-whistling on immigration seems at least partly designed to appeal to them. No wonder 86% of African-Americans and 80% of Hispanics have a negative view of him. Through a conscious effort to spread discord he regularly transgresses moral lines that no decent American public figure ever should. His methods are abhorrent to most Americans; two-thirds of voters dislike him. Yet the minority that does not balk at them is growing.

Call and response For most of the Republican contest, Mr Trump got around 35% of the vote, mainly from white men with only a high-school education. That was more than his rivals—a starting line-up of 17, including four senators, of whom Mr Cruz was the last left standing, and nine current or former governors, including Mr Kasich. But it was low enough to make Mr Trump seem a weak front-runner, unable to win a majority in any state, and apparently dependent for his advantage on the way his opponents had split the mainstream Republican vote. Once the field was winnowed, it was assumed, Mr Trump would be trumped.

Gonna come in first place

Yet it was he who was to prove the main beneficiary of that consolidation. He won his first outright majority in his home state of New York on April 19th. He has since matched that feat six times on the trot; in Indiana he won 53% of the vote. In so doing he has started picking up support from other groups, including college students and women, previously averse to him.

Evangelical Christians have been strangely drawn to Mr Trump from early on. Working-class evangelicals, in particular, took him to victory in southern states such as Georgia and South Carolina. In Indiana, Mr Trump won evangelicals, who represent half the state’s primary electorate, by eight percentage points—which might seem surprising. Mr Trump is thrice-married and irreligious. On primary day in Indiana he also gave voice to an outlandish slander against Mr Cruz’s father, a well-known evangelical preacher. (He suggested, on the basis of no evidence, that Mr Cruz senior had been involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy: “I mean, what was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”)

Despite the initial size of the field, Mr Trump is on the verge of breaking the record for votes won in the Republican primaries (10.8m, set by George Bush in 2000). That is partly because, owing to a combination of riled activists and a growing population, more people vote in Republican primaries these days. He is still a long way shy of the 66m votes with which Mr Obama won re-election in 2012. Yet the size of the haul and the growing breadth of his appeal underlines the fact that, despite his divisiveness, Mr Trump has a solid chance of becoming president.

His odds are helped by having a probable opponent, Hillary Clinton, who is also disliked; around half of voters take a poor view of her. Mrs Clinton must be thrilled to have an opponent more unpopular still, and whom she has beaten in all but two of the last 58 head-to-head polls. Yet such polling tends to be a poor guide until after the party conventions, which focus voters’ minds. And being unpopular is always a weakness. Mrs Clinton’s victory over Mr Trump, though likely, is not assured.

He would be a disastrous president. If Mr Trump’s diagnosis of what ails America is bad, his prescriptions for fixing it are catastrophic. His signature promise is to wall off Mexico and make it pay for the bricks. Even ignoring the fact that America is seeing a net outflow of Mexicans across its southern border this is nonsense. Mexico has already refused to pay. Mr Trump’s response was to threaten to stop remittances being sent home to Mexico: “It’s an easy decision for Mexico. Make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year.” That would probably be illegal, and only by instituting capital controls could Mr Trump prevent people withdrawing cash from an American bank account in Mexico. His other big promises on the border, to deport 11m illegal immigrants and their offspring, and to bar all foreign Muslims from America—“until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”—are no better.

Time for jumping overboard

Mr Trump’s economic positions, some of which he rehearsed in his office, are also fantastical. For example, he has pledged to pay down America’s $19 trillion national debt in eight years, while at the same time cutting taxes by $10 trillion. Given that he has also pledged to protect Social Security, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, has estimated that he would have to cut other areas of government by 93% to meet his objective. He disagrees, citing the growth he promises to unleash by improving America’s trade terms and the savings he would make by rendering the government more efficient. Yet the contribution government waste and abuse makes to America’s $4 trillion federal budget is surely minuscule? “No, all over government,” Mr Trump blusters. “And I’ll tell you where there’s tremendous, tremendous money being spent is on the military. And yet I’m going to build up the military. But I’m going to build it up for us, not for every other country in the world. We’re spending massive amounts of money to protect other nations.” This sort of free-flowing nativist bunkum, purposefully delivered, including random references to unrelated national fears, is illustrative of Mr Trump’s rhetoric.

Other countries should be worried, because Mr Trump has bad news for all of them. He would jettison America’s existing trade agreements in favour of short-term, bilateral negotiations undertaken in a spirit so spikily retaliatory as to make trade wars, with China for starters, inevitable. Mr Trump declared himself ready for that outcome, as he must: his professed willingness to walk away from any negotiation, whether with a rival property developer or the world’s second biggest economy, is part of his shtick. “They can’t afford it, we can,” he says. “We have a trade deficit with China of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.”

To reinforce America’s military writ, Mr Trump would employ similar means. “Let’s say we say we’re going to have a 10% tax on goods coming in from China. Because they’re not supposed to be building in the South China Sea, and because they’ve devalued their currency…I’ll do that in a heartbeat.” He would demand that America’s allies pay “at least” the total cost of any protective American presence—or be abandoned to police themselves: “I would like to continue defending Japan. I would like to continue to defend South Korea. And I would like to defend Germany and Saudi Arabia and other countries. [But] they’ve got to pay up.”

Wait till the party’s over

Mr Trump would be even less indulgent towards America’s multilateral obligations. Asked whether, on the basis of his coruscating criticisms of the United Nations, which he called fat, sloppy and inactive, he would consider withdrawing America from that organisation, he says: “You always have to be prepared to walk or you can never get anything done. And that means walking from countries, in terms of defence, it means walking.”

No one could be more appalled by Mr Trump’s success than the leaders of his own party, most of whom are free-traders and national-security hawks, and all of whom want to win in November. That explains the enthusiasm many Republican bosses and donors showed for the Stop Trump movement. Despite a growing probability that Mr Trump would be their champion, they poured over $5m into television and radio spots supporting Mr Cruz or denigrating Mr Trump in Indiana. (Mr Trump spent less than $1m.)

They had no shortage of ammunition. Mr Trump has in the past bragged about his many sexual conquests. He has had recourse to bankruptcy law four times. His every speech is littered with lies. By one calculation, 76% of his political statements last year were untrue. In a normal year, his Republican critics would have stopped him; why did they fail?

His unusual talents are part of the answer. Charismatic, tactically astute, charming at times and ruthless, Mr Trump is a far more formidable politician than almost anyone had suspected. His outrages have kept print- and broadcast-media attention focused on him; with nearly 8m followers on Twitter and a flair for pithy invective, he rules on social media, too. At the time of his entry into the race, his slander against Mexicans seemed naive as well as boorish; it now seems remarkable how well-formed his pitch to resentful, working-class whites was. He says this was because he understands and shares their concerns. “I worked summers when I was going to school with carpenters and electricians. You know my father was a builder in Brooklyn and Queens, predominantly…I worked with all of these guys, I know these guys.” That has a rare ring of truth. Expedience explains his positions on many issues, including guns, which he once disliked and now advocates, abortion, which he once accepted and now opposes, God, in Whom he previously showed little interest but now praises. His xenophobia and protectionism, however, have form.

Newspaper clippings suggest he vigorously opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993: “The Mexicans want it and that doesn’t sound good to me,” he was reported as saying. On trade, revealingly, and unusually for a man who admits to no weakness, he is even prepared to acknowledge the negative consequences of his populism. Asked whether his supporters would not object, under a Trumpian trade regime, to being forced to pay more for an American-made product, he says: “Maybe they buy less of it. I see people buying five dolls for their daughters; maybe buy two dolls.”

Yet if Mr Trump’s supporters like his message, many are also motivated by disdain for the party bosses who so haplessly opposed him. Exit polls in Indiana suggested half of Republican voters felt “betrayed” by their party. This is a harvest the party sowed in two ways. First, though it is a caricature to suggest, as Mr Trump and others have, that the Republicans have long made fools of distressed working-class whites by offering them God, the flag and tax cuts to the rich, it is a caricature with some truth to it. None of Mr Trump’s 16 rivals spoke convincingly to the concerns of wage-distressed workers; none had a thoughtful answer to them.

Second, years of partisan grandstanding in Congress have discredited America’s entire political process, and the Republicans—especially those of them thrust to power by the party’s previous populist insurgency, the Tea Party—are mainly responsible. The several recent crises Republican congressmen have engineered over the passage of the federal budget, which they sought to hold hostage to their unrealistic and unconstitutional demands of Mr Obama, have earned the voters’ disdain. In that sense, the Trumpian revolt is not a continuation of the false promise raised by the anti-government Tea Party, but its successor. With Mr Trump’s nomination almost assured, its fires, too, must now rage and burn out.

Trump against Clinton: the general election is shaping up to be hot and ugly. There appears to be little prospect of Mr Trump moderating his positions, by lurching to the more ameliorative centre that Republican leaders—fearing electoral annihilation—recommend. Whether he believes in his positions or not, they are mostly too extreme to be credibly revised. Apparently vindicated by his success in the primaries, Mr Trump seems to have little interest in changing tack. That also goes for his aggressive, often offensive methods. Turning to Mrs Clinton, his one-time wedding guest, the presumptive Republican nominee is disdainful. “She’s playing the woman card. That’s all she’s got going. She’s got nothing else going. The only thing she’s got is the woman card. And she plays it to the hilt,” fumes Mr Trump, whom 70% of American women dislike.