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Trump’s habit of scattering his ammunition on targets other than Hillary Clinton is so pronounced that last Thursday, Trump ally Newt Gingrich felt he had to reprimand his candidate for being “frankly pathetic,” noting, “Donald Trump has one opponent. Her name is Hillary Clinton. Her name is not Paul Ryan. It’s not anybody else. It’s Hillary Clinton.”

Normally a presidential candidate doesn’t need to be reminded who the opponent is, but Trump, for whatever reason, can’t keep his aim focused on “Crooked Hillary.” He’s just as likely in a speech or interview to wander off and attack Obama, Bill Clinton, or fellow Republicans.

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Trump sees men, even low-energy ones like Jeb or physically small ones like Rubio, as worthy rivals, as figures he has to compete with for the world’s wealth and glory. Women, by contrast, he sees not as rivals but as objects of sexual conquest. His tendency to sexualize the female half of humanity is so pronounced that he applies it even to wholly inappropriate subjects like young girls (marveling at how pre-teens will one day blossom into women he can date) and his daughter Ivanka. This is why the most forceful insults he applies to women are about their physical appearance—for example, calling Alicia Machado “Miss Piggy,” or saying of Fiorina, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”

Trump has tried to disparage Clinton’s sexual attractiveness as well, suggesting last Friday that her posterior wasn’t up to his standard by telling a crowd in North Carolina that, during the second debate, “when she walked in front of me, believe me, I wasn’t impressed.” And he has obsessively attacked Clinton’s “stamina,” a thinly veiled code word for sexual performance. Trump sees Clinton not just as a woman (an inferior creature in his eyes) but as an undesirable one (not worth anything to him as a potential sexual conquest).

Since Trump can’t respect Clinton as a peer or worthy foe, he has to figure out some way to reframe the battle. So he portrays her as a mere facade of a larger system he’s fighting: “Crooked Hillary,” the face of the corrupt establishment. And he accuses her of cheating—by “rigging” the election in coordination with the media, and by taking performance-enhancing drugs that help her win debates (as Hannah Fearn notes in The Independent, this carries with it the suggestion that as a woman she’s too weak for power without medical aid).

This delusional counter-narrative is the only salve for his wounded ego, his only defense against the psychic shock that’s coming. Because if and when Trump loses on election day, he’ll face the ultimate indignity for a sexist: He got trounced by a girl. And she’ll have beaten him fair and square.