I have to wonder what his campaign team is doing.
Are they trying to break his denial, so he'll course correct?
Are they trying to talk around it and still get him to course correct?
Are they in denial?
Or is Trump aware of how badly he did and just putting on an act?
I'm going for choice #2.
I'd argue the current Trump is the same one that soured on Manafort around the time his numbers took a huge hit. Trump, when wounded, acts like a child who limps back to his safe space to get coddled. The write-up of Trump running back to the spin room once the debate was over shows this. He ran to get back into that bubble.
I think he knows that he'll lose, so he's going to ride this thing out with sycophants around him instead of people pushing and prodding to get his numbers higher. Remember, he doesn't care at all if the GOP holds Congress, so he's not interested in improving if it means he'll still lose. Comfort is king to Trump.
The absurd othering is pretty much a function of how the human brain processes information, unfortunately. We're constantly looking for patterns, even unconsciously. This is obviously helpful for breaking down complex information into manageable chunks; "what features does this thing have in common with other things that I already know about" helps simplify learning new things. The problem is that our brain doesn't differentiate between doing that with objects or concepts and doing it with people or groups. That leads to stereotypes, and negative stereotypes quickly become prejudice unless we intentionally force ourselves to think about things in a different way than our brain typically works. Most people are content to be intellectually lazy because it takes a tremendous amount of effort to restructure your thinking every time you have to consider new people or groups, and unfortunately that allows prejudice to flourish. Fortunately this type of thinking goes away when people are confronted with individuals who don't fit into their established stereotypes; social conservatives tend to be a lot more compassionate towards gay people if they have a gay son or daughter, for example. Unfortunately, we tend to self-segregate (which is another function of this intellectual laziness), so we are inadvertently allowing our own stereotypes to go unchecked. It's not a problem with a simple solution, unfortunately, but it's not fair to assume that it's only a function of "conservative" thinking; we all do it on a certain level (although not to the level of "establishing an enemy" obviously).
I wouldn't necessarily call it laziness though. As a mathematician, my entire field exists to strip things down to their barest features so that they can be more easily classified. This is true for a lot of academic endeavors, I'd wager. If you can set up very broad categories that you can still totally describe, then you don't need to roll up your sleeves and get into it.
It's essentially the scene in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs where the reporter keeps asking "Can it make X?" and the scientist has to say, "Since X is a food, yes" over and over again.
The problem is that our classifications have gotten hitched around wedge issues that will never be resolved. I mean, I'd love to say that my mother and I agreed on something political, but she's pro-life, and will never ever budge on that. To her, it's literally murder. I can't reason with that, and there's no compromise ground there. She will never vote for a Democrat for as long as she lives since they kill babies (her words obviously). Never gonna happen.
The worst thing that can happen politically is to bring a wedge issue to the forefront. Then you've created a situation where everyone has an "other" and you'll never find common ground.*
*The obvious caveat is that eventually you have to get around to discussing these issues, but there's a ton of shit we could do beforehand that could involve compromise and progress.
