The guy wasn't taking his meds, for probably years now. What gave anyone the impression he had the discipline to run a campaign much at all?
It’s mostly due to their embarrassing predictions about Trump collapsing throughout 2016 so people gotta overcompensate for their failures by taking every joke candidacy somewhat seriously. Pre 2015, there would be no thread for this.
I can see where that school of thought would be coming from. But Trump was actually incredibly disciplined in 2016 and he stayed on message, saying the right things in the right situations among the key swing voters, allowing him to ride his way into an EC majority. If he was completely off-the-rails and unfocused, then he likely would have lost.
In the end, discipline is important for a political campaign.