What Does Trump Need to Do to Lose This Election?

On Thursday, Donald Trump swaggered into the Economic Club of New York and, before going into some of the details in his constantly changing tax plan, couldn't resist some ad-libbed bragging to his audience about how well he was doing.

"We had some really incredible things happen today," he said. "The polls are coming out—we're leading in so many polls, I don't know where to begin. But that's a good feeling."

Trump congratulates himself as instinctively as fish shit in the ocean, but even the most contentious fact-checker would have to concur with the self-proclaimed billionaire's assessment of the polls. In the past week, a smorgasbord of surveys have found Trump leading in swing states from Ohio to Florida to Utah to North Carolina; many national polls gave Trump a slim lead as well. There's a lot of campaigning left to do, the polls as a whole show the race in a dead heat, and Trump needs to carry pretty much every swing state on the board to actually win. Still, he's undeniably surging.

This raises a question: What the fuck?

Trump's incompetence, habitual lying, and willingness to take advantage of the less fortunate are public knowledge to anyone who is paying even a little bit of attention. A Trump-branded real estate seminar is being sued for fraud, and Trump's personal foundation has been accused of using other people's money to bribe politicians and buy a giant painting of the candidate. His international business dealings could create massive conflicts of interest if he ever took office. He has a history of not paying contractors. He has spoken approvingly of torture. If he's not a racist himself, he at least makes appeals to nativism—building a massive wall, keeping Muslims out of the country—that white supremacists love. He engaged in an ugly public feud with the parents of a dead veteran. He's done racist impressions of Asians and condoned violence against protesters. As I was writing this, he lied about the origins of the racist birther conspiracy he advanced for years.

Everyone from his ghostwriter to Mitt Romney has called him completely unfit to be president. The New Hampshire Union Leader, normally a GOP-supporting paper, endorsed Libertarian Gary Johnson instead, calling Trump "a liar, a bully, a buffoon." The Richmond Times-Dispatch did likewise. The Dallas Morning News, another Republican stalwart, wrote that "Donald Trump is not qualified to serve as president and does not deserve your vote," then endorsed Clinton, the first Democrat the paper had backed in 75 years.

Despite all that, Trump could be the next president. What polls have recently made clear is that while a majority of Americans think he's unqualified for the job, some of those people will vote for him anyway. But why? How is it possible that Trump has remained so popular?

The easy thing to do would be to say that the people planning to vote for Trump are not paying attention, but that's a dodge, a way to dismiss Trumpites as ignorant. His supporters have heard all the attacks on him made by both the Clinton campaign and the media—back during the primary, a focus group of Trump backers found that many of these attacks made them like him more. Americans don't trust the media, and they don't trust Clinton.

The people who denounce Trump tend to be Establishment figures: big-city newspaper editors, longtime politicians, celebrities—in other words, the same people Trump says have been screwing up the country. Is it any wonder his voters don't give a shit what those people think? When 50 former GOP officials wrote a letter saying Trump is "not qualified to be president," it was simple for him to shrug them off as being irrelevant and incompetent, the people who had turned the Middle East into a mess in the first place.

The other thing Trump has going for him is that Clinton is, as everyone has noted, a weak candidate herself—not as inspiring as Obama, weighted down in voters' minds by her own habits of obfuscation and secrecy, hurt recently by an incident that saw her conceal her pneumonia from the public, then nearly collapsing while attending a 9/11 memorial. A longstanding mainstream theory of this election is that it's about voting against the candidate you hate, not voting for the one you love—hatred of Clinton has brought a lot of Republicans around to Trump.

But antipathy to Clinton just explains why people would vote Republican. It doesn't explain why Trump beat all those more polished politicians in the primary, and it doesn't quite explain the undead quality his campaign has, its ability to stagger on and even surge in the polls—after all, Trump was trending upward even before Clinton's pneumonia resulted in a wave of negative stories about her.

Scattered in with all the big and small lies Trump tells is a big truth: America has been screwed over by the people running the country. The war in Iraq was based on bad intelligence and promoted by the media, then horribly mismanaged; warnings of the financial crisis were ignored, no one responsible for it was punished in any significant way, and the recovery from it has been slow. People feel disenfranchised as a result, they feel angry, they feel that they've been abandoned.

"Imagine you are one of the millions of middle-aged unemployed white Americans with a high school degree," the conservative writer Ben Domenech said recently. "Your tomorrows look dark. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, look like gold. And when a golden-haired man comes on TV, a man who represents a version of what you might hope your life could be like… he tells you it's not your fault your life is the way it is. He tells you it's the fault of immigrants and bad trade deals and wasteful pointless wars based on lies. He tells you the problem with elites is not that they are too conservative or too liberal, but that they are stupid and don't care about you. He tells you, with confidence, that he alone can make everything great again. And you listen."

Campaigns are about telling stories to voters, and that's a powerful one. It's a story that makes a certain kind of person feel good and powerful again, and it doesn't matter too much if a lot of that story is BS, or if that golden-haired man is really a two-bit huckster. Trump gives people something to believe in, and they aren't going to give that belief up for a few inconvenient facts.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.