Donald Trump is a man of huge contradictions.

He regularly decries that the U.S. has accumulated a national debt of $19 trillion, yet has proposed a tax cut and associated economic ideas that the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates would add between $11.7 trillion and $15.1 trillion to the debt over the next decade.

He calls journalists—and this is a direct quote from a rally in Florida over the weekend—“the most dishonest people on earth…disgusting, dishonest human beings.” Yet he is conducting a campaign that is built around the free media coverage their organizations provide.

He promises to smash Islamic State fighters harder than anyone else, yet evinces little interest in putting American troops into Syria to do it—the kind of position that prompted 117 former Republican national-security officials to declare in an open letter opposing his nomination that he “swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.”

Yet none of this seems to matter to his many fervent supporters. Why?