Everyone always says that what they want in an elected official – mayor, U.S. senator, student council treasurer, POTUS, what have you – is an "outsider." It comes in large part from people thinking "the system" is corrupt, that to be a politician is to be a mud-wrestler: Even if you're good at it, you need a shower afterwards to be seen in polite company, and you'll probably still have dirt under your fingernails.

If the 2016 presidential election is good for nothing else, it has shown us the fallacy, not to mention the danger, inherent in such a belief.

Donald Trump is hardly the first outsider to run for president. In recent memory, both Ross Perot and Ralph Nader, neither with past elected experience, had significant impacts on presidential elections despite their political inexperience. Neither of them, though, ran under the banner of one of the two major political parties.

Trump is now, officially, the Republican nominee for president, and his political naiveté, as well as his lack of electoral dirt under his fingernails, was on full display at last week's Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

I'm writing this before the Democrats’ finish their convention in Philadelphia, and it's entirely possible that, by the end of it all, presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton and the Democrats will have imploded and the premise of this column will implode with them. But my premise is this: Every major milestone in this election season has demonstrated why, counter to Americans' insistence that it is what they want, running an outsider for president is a horrible idea.

Exhibit A: Trump is kind of dumb

Many people like Trump because he seems to have no filter between brain and mouth. "He speaks his mind," they say. It is entirely true that even a lightly seasoned political veteran will have learned to speak with measured caution, to install the necessary filter. No one would accuse Clinton, the "insider," of lacking that filter. Indeed, among the biggest knocks against her, often by the same people who like Trump's unscripted riffing, is that she is too calculating in what she says and does.

But Trump, though! He has almost literally no message discipline at all. This is glaringly apparent in his Twitter feed, which apparently Trump himself controls most of the time. Rather than focus on his own policies and campaign, Trump mostly uses the account to attack others, including the news media and opponents from both parties.

Over the weekend, for example, Trump tweeted concerning the Wikileaks dump of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, attempting to stir up a fight between Clinton supporters and those who supported her primary opponent Bernie Sanders. But the attempt to provoke a fight wasn't even the worst part, since the tweet misspelled two common words. He picked the wrong pair from the waste/waist homophones and didn't even make a homophone error by simply spelling their T-H-I-E-R instead. This tweet was deleted and reposted with correct spelling.

Even some nominally liberal national reporters like Matt Yglesias and Dave Weigel said the typo-laden tweet was "charming" and an improvement over Clinton's "this committee has approved a witticism" style, buying into the "outsider" image of Trump. Look, people, Trump is not "charming." His amateurism is dangerous, not cute, and perpetuating the latter is just as dangerous.

When Trump is asked simple questions about policy, he can't focus long enough to offer a remotely coherent answer. Perhaps Trump is just not that up on policy – he is an "outsider" after all – but the ADD style inherent in Trump's off-the-cuff speaking shows the danger of putting someone into office who not only doesn't understand fine points of policy but can't admit it.

Rather than say "I don't know" or "That's a question for my advisors whom I trust to point me in the right direction," he veers off into non-sequiturs and jokes. This is not a man you want sitting at the G8 table or in the situation room during a crisis.

As I and many others have noted, Clinton is in fact a policy nerd. There's a great story in this profile of Clinton that involves card tables and the notes she takes everywhere she goes. She listens to people, reads the news and analysis, and puts those pieces together to propose actual solutions to real problems. It doesn't sound glamorous – it is no "Make America Great Again!" – but "card-table time" is how real work gets done in politics.

Trump's unscripted speeches (and ad-libbed asides during scripted speeches) have no structure, no through-line a listener can follow and understand. Trump's speech introducing his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, was a rambling, self-centered mess that barely even mentioned Pence. It was mostly about how awesome he himself was.

I cannot imagine what kind of speech Trump would have given if, say, his administration had been the one to find and kill Osama bin Laden. President Obama's speech that night was short, careful and gracious to our military allies and the men and women who planned and carried out the operation.

Trump would have thrown himself a ticker-tape parade and crowned himself King Of The Manliest Kings That Ever Kinged! Is that really what we hope for when we ask for an "outsider": a policy-ignorant narcissist?

Exhibit B: Trump's big moments are giant failures

The whole Pence roll-out overall was a terrible mess beyond just the speech. Yes, the planned timeline was interrupted by the coup attempt in Turkey, but even before that news broke, the process was full of leaks, false-starts and campaign associates mucking up the coverage in the press by suggesting that Trump couldn't make up his mind even after his decision was supposedly final.

In selecting Pence, Trump chose a severely reactionary conservative governor who is deeply unpopular in his home state for the sake of "party unity," according to that introductory speech.

Pence's history is frightening but in line with the kind of demagoguery Trump likes; for example, Pence first rose to national prominence by using campaign donations to pay his mortgage and credit card bills, something legal at the time but so absurd his case inspired bipartisan consensus to ban such practices. But can't you just see Trump expressing envy at how Pence put one over on the suckers?

Compare that to the way Clinton rolled out the selection of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine last week. The process was tightly scheduled and highly scripted. Even as speculation built throughout the day Friday that Kaine was the likeliest choice, there were no stories of "campaign insiders confirm it's Kaine" before Clinton texted America that evening.

Kaine is not a tree-hugging, uber-progressive figure at the fringes of his own party, but rather a well-liked and reliably liberal Democrat whose personal history and demeanor are not merely spotless but make Jimmy Stewart's character in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" look positively evil in comparison.

Clinton's introduction of Kaine was about Kaine, not herself, and her selection of someone slightly to her own right suggests she is redirecting her campaign to appeal to the most voters possible, rather than just the extreme ideological edge. This is smart politics, something an "outsider" like Trump can't grasp.

The Republican National Convention, too, was a disaster. Every night featured some major screw-up that distracted from the message, even though that message – America is weak and falling apart – is itself a disaster. Speeches were not properly vetted, resulting in everything from plagiarism to Ted Cruz refusing to endorse Trump and getting booed to Ivanka Trump reading what sounded like the Democratic platform before she introduced her father.

To an extent, the press latched onto these screw-ups because, of course, it's easier to talk about plagiarism than it is to talk about the absurd policies a Trump presidency would pursue.

As I said, there's still most of the DNC to go, and Monday, there were some rocky moments when a few disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters booed former Sanders backers as they spoke and even heckled Sanders himself when he asked his people to support Clinton. But those iffy moments Monday night were far outshone by brilliant speeches from Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren, and I predict – perhaps foolishly – the rest of the convention will be smooth, without the major gaffes and hitches that dogged Trump's amateurish, "outsider" convention.

At the very least, unlike Trump rivals Kasich and Cruz, Sanders forcefully and happily endorsed Clinton, and that alone shows how much more professional Clinton's campaign is running.

Exhibit C: Trump is a bully

The day after the convention was over, after Trump was able to leave the TelePrompTers behind and get back into free-styling his speeches, the first thing he did was go after primary rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich. Cruz, of course, did not endorse Trump at the convention, and Kasich, as of this writing, also has not given Trump an endorsement. Many other Republicans, too, have said they would not stand behind their party's nominee, drawing wrath from Trump in speeches or press conferences or, again, on Twitter.

Throughout the primaries, bullying was Trump's way to deal with his opponents, from shouting over them at debates to mocking them in his speeches and campaign appearances. Now that the primary is open, he's gone all-in on bullying tactics against Clinton, with stupid nicknames ("Crooked Hillary") and even borrowing blatantly anti-Semitic memes he finds on the internet to make fun of and intimidate his opponents.

His mockery is not limited to political rivals; he mercilessly made fun of a disabled reporter early in the campaign, for example. Trump's entire oeuvre seems to be punching down: "The Apprentice" is a reality series mostly about Trump abusing and then "firing" contestants, while his entire business empire is built around the skill – and he brags about this – of taking advantage of others' weaknesses or simply refusing to follow through on contracts and promises.

This comes through when Trump does talk policy. His biggest and most popular idea is to "build a wall," a policy he discusses in the context of those on the other side of that wall being monstrous caricatures. His foreign policy ideas are mostly just swinging his big stick (to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt). If Trump were a ten-year-old boy, his proudest accomplishment would be the "No Muslims Allowed" sign crudely painted on cardboard and hung on the door to his treehouse.

Clinton, despite the way she is portrayed as a heartless ice queen in conservative media, is very much the opposite. She listens to people. She does not mock others or tear people down to build herself up. Clinton understands that the way to win in politics is not to be the loudest bully in the room but to build coalitions and find common ground.

Where Trump is blithely dismissive of even our most important allies around the world, Clinton has actually worked with the leaders of those countries to promote peace and prosperity around the world.

The "outsider" here would be a disaster not just for us here at home, but around the world.

Exhibit D: "Make America Great Again" is not a plan

My favorite bit about the process of Trump picking a running mate is the opening anecdote to this story. While it may be apocryphal – everyone is speaking on the condition of anonymity, etc. – it rings true with what we know about Trump's style and ambition. The story is that Trump's campaign offered the VP spot to Ohio Governor John Kasich, a primary rival, with the incentive that Kasich would be in charge of both foreign and domestic policy.

"Then what, the (Kasich) adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of? 'Making America great again' was the casual reply."

The outsider here admits he can't handle the job of being president and instead is simply running to be CEO of America. CEO is a largely symbolic role that consists mostly of pulling in a paycheck and being the public face of a company while other people – the board of directors, the worker bees in the factories – do all the real work. He wants to be CEO because he knows he can't actually do any of that work at all himself.

While the election of presidents here has long verged on mere popularity contests, there is little doubt in my mind that the major party candidates have all had a real interest in real policy to improve the country, even people I opposed like Mitt Romney and Bob Dole. But Trump's website is devoid of policy ideas and instead full of bombast and show. His speech to the RNC last Thursday was a litany of complaints – many of them phony or false – without any concrete ideas for how to fix any of it except for electing him to run the place.

While I do not know what Clinton will say this Thursday when she speaks, I assure you it will not be 75 minutes of braggadocio and bluster. It will be thoughtful and reasoned and full of specific detail about what policies she wants to pursue in her administration to improve America's standing at home and abroad.

Yes, Clinton is the "insider." Yes, that means she carries the stink of Washington upon her. But it also means that she's got the experience, the accumulated wisdom and the respect both of and for others necessary to lead on day one. She isn't running to be CEO; she's running to be president.