As Donald Trump’s closing pitch grows more violent and incoherent, many of my fellow pundits have wondered if he’s just losing it. That presupposes, of course, that he once had it, whatever "it" may have been.

I don’t know about the incoherence, but I don’t think the growing violence of his speech—opining, for instance, that we need a day of unchecked police violence to restore law and order—is the Lear-like meandering of an aggrieved old man. I think it’s a very conscious strategy to turn out those Trump supporters who are least likely to vote: working-class young men. Even if it’s not conscious on Trump’s part, I think his handlers know that their employer’s adding a little ultraviolence to his speeches may prod just enough smoldering incels and other angry young men to bring themselves to the polls.

Trump’s get-out-the-vote problem was well illustrated by a Washington Post poll of Michigan voters late last week. The poll revealed that Trump led Kamala Harris by a 47 percent to 45 percent margin among registered voters, but trailed her 47-46 among likely voters. That discrepancy follows logically from what we know about the candidates’ respective voting bases. Harris’s base is disproportionately female and college-educated, both groups that tend to turn out in higher numbers than male and working-class voters. Much of Trump’s base, correspondingly, turns out to vote at lower rates. And the lowest rate of all is that of working-class young men.

The Trump campaign is aware of this, of course. It’s the reason why the pro-Trump canvass operations—vexed, fraught, and inexperienced though they may be—are focusing on "low propensity voters," who are disproportionately young men. It’s the reason why Trump is going on every independent media or social media outlet that has built any semblance of a fuck-’em-all young male audience. It’s the reason why Trump and JD Vance sat for a collective six hours with Joe Rogan and why Trump trots out Hulk Hogan at his rallies. If the voters he needs respond best to spectacles of violence, or maybe even real violence, then spectacles of violence—with the threat of real violence—is precisely what he’ll provide.