Why Trump's Campaign Refuses to Die, No Matter What the Media Says

Since the Democratic National Convention ended, Donald Trump has been acting like a man who wants to lose an election. Describing his last week is like describing Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights; there's so much going on, so many unnatural or incomprehensible bits, that you can get muddled just trying to sum it up. But let's try:

After Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a Muslim American soldier who died heroically in combat in Iraq, criticized Trump in one of the DNC's most emotional moments, Trump didn't simply ignore it and move on. Instead, he fired back at the couple, implying Ghazala wasn't allowed to speak because she was a Muslim. Responding to Khizr's assertion that Trump hadn't sacrificed for his country, he said that he had "scarified" for America by creating thousands of jobs. The impolitic statements let the media run with the story days after the Khans' speech.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump refused to endorse Arizona senator John McCain or House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary race, reportedly enraging Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus. A confidant of top Trump advisor Paul Manafort told CNBC Manafort was "mailing it in" and the staff was "suicidal." GOP officials are reportedly thinking about (read: fantasizing about) what would happen if Trump quit the campaign entirely before November. Former HP CEO Meg Whitman, who once ran for California governor as a Republican, is openly raising money for Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, at his events, Trump has spent a lot of time railing against fire marshals for keeping people out of the venues for "political reasons," even though the marshals say that his staff agreed on the number of people who would be allowed inside beforehand.

What else? Oh yeah, Trump said that women facing sexual harassment at work should stay in the job "if there's not a better alternative." Trump also called Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—the capital city of a vital swing state—a "war zone," offending that city's officials. And apparently, during one meeting with a national security advisor months ago, Trump repeatedly asked why the US couldn't use nuclear weapons. "Mass Defections Expected as Donald Trump's Campaign Implodes," read a Vanity Fair headline; New York magazine, slightly more cautious, went with "Donald Trump's Campaign Might Actually Implode."

Meanwhile, on Trump's Twitter:

Great day in Virginia. Crowd was fantastic!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)August 3, 2016

There is great unity in my campaign, perhaps greater than ever before. I want to thank everyone for your tremendous support. Beat Crooked H!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)August 3, 2016

My analysis: Things look bad for Trump! But I also pay an abnormal amount of attention to this stuff; it is literally part of my job. I work for a media company that gives me health insurance and free snacks, I pay a shitload of money for fancy coffee beans, I watch more premium-cable shows than reality TV, I don't own a gun, I made an art-history reference like three paragraphs ago, and I am not by any measure poor. I'm not Trump's target audience, in other words. I imagine that a lot of DC and New York people are basically in that same narrow demographic, and to us, Trump's campaign has looked like a dumpster fire for a long time, and it is now imploding, mixed metaphors be damned.

The question is, do normal people—the folks who don't follow the same 200 Twitter accounts, who don't pay attention to the "narrative" of the campaign—care?

Trump's core supporters certainly don't. The alleged billionaire could, as he once said, shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and wouldn't lose his fan base. The Guardian interviewed people at Trump rallies and found that they either hadn't heard of the Khan controversy—a story that the press has been fixated on—or weren't bothered by it. "Everybody's said terrible things," one told the publication.

Anyone who has covered Trump for any amount of time knows that he lies constantly, or at least doesn't care whether the shit he says is true. This is different from other politicians using weasel words or vague statements or recontextualizing something—Trump lies about everything from giving to charity to the size of the crowds he draws to whether American Muslims cheered on 9/11. Yet if you aren't paying close attention to the ways Trump's dishonesty is different from ordinary political shadiness, you might dismiss all of this.

A CNN/ORC poll found that Clinton was leading Trump by nine points, but found that voters found them equally dishonest (34 percent of respondents thought Clinton was trustworthy, versus 35 percent for Trump). Maybe if he was facing a candidate not named Hillary Clinton Trump would be vulnerable to attacks on his compulsive lying, but so far it doesn't seem like such assaults are sticking.

Remember, too, that all of the anti-Trump rhetoric is coming from the media, an institution Americans trust less and less. I can tell you that Trump is a liar, that his attacks on Muslims and Mexican immigrants are either racist or a naked appeal to racists, same difference, but will you believe me, a 20-something Brooklynite with an admitted anti-Trump bias? The press is also often seen as pushing political correctness—which Trump supporters and many others on the right despise—and the notion that the economy has recovered. The numbers may say that the country's fortunes have improved, but wages have remained stagnant for decades, inequality is still rising, and homeowners are still struggling with unaffordable mortgages or choosing not to buy homes altogether.

This is what Trump means when he says that the system is rigged, which may be his most persuasive argument. The people telling you that the world is getting better when your livelihood is precarious are also the people telling you that the things you say are offensive or even racist, and the same people saying that Trump is super duper awful. To many primed to back an Anti-Establishment candidate, he might tell little lies that his opponents jump on, but his truths are big truths. Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention, full of stories of homicide and poverty and a world on fire, seemed insanely apocalyptic to people like me—not to mention full of falsehoods—but it also may have rang true to many people in a way that Clinton's "stronger together" optimism does not.

Clinton is currently leading in pretty much every poll and has done better since the DNC ended. But her lead is still in the single digits, which is to say that Trump still has a puncher's chance, no matter how many strange statements he makes, no matter how many times the media crows about his amateur-hour mistakes on the trail. The correct metaphor for Trump's candidacy is not an implosion but Springfield's perpetual tire fire from The Simpsons—an ugly, smelly blaze that nonetheless refuses to go out.