Everybody knew Donald Trump was a joke.

In June of last year, Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight said that Trump had a better chance of “cameoing in another ‘Home Alone’ movie with Macaulay Culkin” than winning the nomination. His colleague Nate Silver called Trump’s behavior “imbecilic” and predicted a quick flameout. In July the Huffington Post declared that Trump’s campaign would be covered in the site’s Entertainment section on the grounds that “Trump’s campaign is a sideshow.” Robert Schlesigner, managing editor of U.S. News & World Report, wrote that he “burst out in giggles of delight” upon seeing Trump atop the GOP polls. At the Washington Post, Dana Milbank promised to eat his own column if Trump was nominated. At the National Review, Kevin Williamson dismissed Trump as a “second-rate” mind who was “made out of cookie dough.”

In the wake of Trump’s subsequent blitz through the GOP primary to claim the Republican nomination, these same pundits have been busy penning think pieces exploring their predictive failure. The explanation for Trump's success, however, is simple, and it’s the same factor that will help bolster Trump’s chances going into the general election: clown armor.

What is "clown armor"? Simply put, it's the aura of buffoonish stupidity that Trump has managed to cultivate through a lifetime of Trump Steaks, WWE appearances, childish Twitter insults, vindictive pettiness, over-the-top tackiness, deep insecurity, terrible combovers, and the endless stream of bullshit percolating out of his orange, leathery maw. How can you take this person seriously? You can’t. He’s Dr. Oz, Kim Kardashian, and Leona Helmsley wrapped into one. And that's the clown armor - because it's impossible to take the man seriously, nothing he says or does is treated seriously.

Trump gets a few crucial benefits from his clown armor. First, it leaves the press (deliberately or not) following the 2015 Huffington Post model and covering Trump through the more forgiving lens of entertainment and not politics. When Trump says something outrageous about whatever, like his stream-of-consciousness idea to “make a deal” and “buy back [the national] debt at a discount” (i.e., devalue U.S. Savings bonds, the world’s safest and most widely held debt security), the story isn't "Holy shit this dude's proposals would cause an economic meltdown," it's "LOL crazy ol' Donnie did it again."

A few people might knock out a few explainers outlining why exactly his ideas are ridiculous, but for the most part the media chooses the story about the statement and the reaction, not the underlying idea. Soon thereafter, Trump will either double down on his initial statement, sparking a new round of statement/reaction stories, or the campaign will walk it all back - pretending that Trump really meant some other more reasonable thing, and acting slightly offended that anyone twisted his words to mean the exact thing that he explicitly said - and everyone moves on.

Take a look at this exchange from Trump’s interview with George Stephanopoulos regarding the debt buyback issue (apologies for the long excerpt):

STEPHANOPOULOS: You've raised a lot of eyebrows with your position on debt and Treasury bills in an interview the other day. You said you might try to repurchase it at a discount. Won't that undermine the full faith and credit of the United States?

TRUMP: No. If we can buy at a discount, that's a great thing. We have to lower debt. We have $9 trillion in debt. It's going to be $21 trillion, because frankly, the budget was horrible that was made six months ago, the omnibus budget, it was a disaster, what it does, what it represents. It's going to bring us up to $21 trillion.

Look, we have to do two things. I'm a low interest rate person. I believe now if you have vint -- if you have inflation, we're going to have to change that theory, because you're going to have to stoop things -- slow things down.

But right now, we have low interest rates. We have to rebuild the whole infrastructure of our country. I know the infrastructure. I've really gotten to know it even better now. You go to airports, they're falling down. If you go right -- I mean look at LaGuardia. You land at LaGuardia, it's an embarrassment. Look at Kennedy. Look at -- look at lax and Newark.

STEPHANOPOULOS: If you try to buy debt back (INAUDIBLE) interest rates are going to go up.

TRUMP: No, you can buy debt back (INAUDIBLE)...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you have to borrow to pay for it.

TRUMP: No, you buy debt back and you take advantage of certain things. You can -- as an example, there are people with large homes. Do you know China right now has $1.8 trillion of our debt, OK? And they're cheating us. And they're friends of mine.

STEPHANOPOULOS: They're not going to (INAUDIBLE)...

TRUMP: Well, you never know. You never know. All of a sudden they have to sell at a discount. You don't -- you don't know that. At some point, they might want to get out. Maybe they need their money. They might want to get out.

When you can do it, when you can take advantage, you do that. But you might want to issue new long-term debt and very low interest rates and you may want a -- a combination of buying back some debt and rebuild our infrastructure.

George, we've spent more than $4 trillion in the Middle East and our country is going to hell.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's talk more about the Middle East.

Fucking what?! Stephanopoulos is wholly unequipped and/or unmotivated to challenge Trump on his ludicrously stupid idea. (In case you're wondering, it's an idiotic idea because nobody is going to voluntarily sell Treasury bonds, the world’s most liquid and widely held debt asset, to the government at a discount when they can get full value on the open market, and a unilateral devaluing of Treasury bonds would be cataclysmic to the global economy given how widely held they are – a simultaneous and global hit to balance sheets is what brought on the last economic crisis.)