Only one subject truly animates Donald Trump on the campaign trail, and it is, of course, the same one that delights and fascinates him in the Oval Office and everywhere else: himself.

“No President has ever achieved what we’ve achieved,” he told the audience at a campaign rally over the weekend, at a high school in Vandalia, Ohio.

“You know what GOAT means? Greatest of all time,” he said in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday. “We gotta be, ’cause there has been no President that’s done more in the first two years than President Trump.”

“We achieved more in two years than any other Presidency in the history of our country,” he said on Wednesday, in San Antonio, Texas, where a Democrat—running against Trump’s hand-picked candidate—now stands an even chance of winning a Senate seat in the state for the first time since 1988.

No wonder, then, that Trump’s diagnosis of his party’s plight in advance of the midterm elections flows back to this one key insight of his, which is that politics is, and should be, solely about him. Hence his refrain at these rallies. “Please pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he told the crowd at the high school in Ohio, where Democrats are threatening to retake both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat just two years after Trump won the state by double digits. “When I’m on the ballot, people show up and you always win,” he added in Nebraska, on Monday. “So I’m asking you to do me one favor: pretend I’m on the ballot, please.”

By my reckoning, Trump spent some seven hours and fifty-six minutes addressing the (dwindling) Trump faithful in his campaign tour this week, a last-ditch effort to stave off what an increasing number of both Democrats and Republicans believe may be a loss of both the House and the Senate. The President’s itinerary speaks to the abrupt reversal of fortunes for the G.O.P. this election year, with Trump stumping in what should be safely red territory: Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio, Nebraska, and back to Texas. He won these five states by an average margin of twenty-two per cent in 2024. In Texas, where he will soon return for a third visit, nearly all recent polls have the Democratic nominee for Senate, James Talarico, leading the Republican state attorney general, Ken Paxton, several of them with more than fifty per cent support—a key threshold.

Historically unpopular and trapped in a war of his own choosing in the Middle East, which has sent global prices spiking upward for just about everything, the President has nonetheless been going with a standard stump speech that is a litany of all the winning that’s taken place during his reign—so much of it that, really, he told the crowd in Ohio, one could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps, under Trump, America was actually “winning too much.” On and on he lectured his audiences about the great stock market, the terrific tariffs, and the most closed-shut border in history. He waxed poetic about his incredible poll numbers—if only among self-defined MAGA supporters—and enthused about the golden age that he has brought forth for our once troubled land.

All this, and yet two-thirds of the country thinks the U.S. is on the wrong track?

Denial, of course, has long been one of Trump’s signatures as a politician. But in this of all years it seems a bit of a surprising choice for a campaign theme. “We have almost no inflation, by the way,” he said in Ohio. As for affordability, he explained in Nebraska, it was a plot that “they” had cooked up to attack him with.

In all of the rallies, Trump said little about the self-inflicted crisis that has become the dominant issue in the 2026 campaign: the war against Iran and the attendant global economic squeeze. To the extent that he mentioned the conflict at all, it was to promise that it would be over “very soon,” causing prices for oil and everything else to plunge. In Nebraska, he joked that prices were going to fall so fast and so sharply, in fact, that “you might say, ‘Please, please, sir, it’s going down too fast.’ ”

But there was a note of un-Trumpian insecurity to it all that made this performance unlike any of the many previous Trump campaign tours I’ve watched during the past decade. In Alabama, he said the quiet part out loud and admitted that the conflict was not likely to end until “probably right after the midterms.”

“We’re kicking Iran’s ass,” the President said in Nebraska. “You do know that, right?”

The only real news related to Iran to come out of his speeches was the controversy that broke out over whether he had actually invited the nuking of Los Angeles and San Diego, or merely spoke in such a circuitous and garbled way that it appeared he had done so, when, in fact, he meant that he was at war with Iran in order to prevent it from having nuclear weapons that might, someday, theoretically, be used to attack California.

One thing that struck me, listening to Trump at each of his six stops, was how little joy the President seemed to take from the exercise. Back in the 2018 campaign, his eyes still lit up with hatred for the enemies of the people, and he exuded delight to be joined onstage by some of the Fox News personalities whose shows consumed so much of his White House workday. Rallies were always his happy place. He knew then, just as he knows now, that his party was likely to get thumped in the midterms. But this 2026 Trump is not nearly so much of a happy warrior. His present mood seemed better exemplified by a threat that he casually threw out on Saturday night, in the midst of his Ohio speech, apropos of what I was not entirely sure: “We’re going to shove it up their ass,” he vowed. “O.K.?”

As a speaker, Trump remains at his best, or at least at his most animated, when on the attack, and there’s nothing more practiced in the Trump lexicon than the language of dark horror with which he describes conditions in the hellscape that is blue America. He is forever reliving the glory of that “American carnage” Inaugural address.

In Texas on Wednesday night, one passage in particular stuck out to me, with its elaborate and yet oddly specific description of the awfulness of cities sunk into the “squalor, misery, poverty, homelessness” that goes along with Democratic rule: “When the blues get in, everything becomes dirty. The streets are dirty. The doorknobs going into stores are dirty. The sidewalks are filthy, dirty. Everything becomes dirty and has a bad smell.” Huh? That’s a new one, as far as I can tell, even for Trump.

And it’s not just those blue-state cesspools that Trump likes to rail against. Democrats, in his speeches, are “cheaters, they cheat like hell,” as he put it in Oklahoma, a rabble of Communists and child mutilators and illegal-immigrant lovers who are going to ruin everything that he and his base have done. The President offered shout-outs to a long list of these terrible nation-wreckers: the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a “bad student” who made up climate change); the “ungrateful” former Texas congressman Henry Cuellar (who was pardoned by Trump but refused to quit the Democratic Party and become a Republican); the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (“a total Communist”); the “guy in Georgia,” by which I guess he meant the Democratic senator Jon Ossoff, who “looks like Pee-wee Herman.”’ In Nebraska, he went after Dan Osborn, “a fake Independent” running for Senate against the Republican incumbent, Pete Ricketts—Osborn is, Trump said, a “radical left lunatic” who will “take your guns away if he gets in” and “who wants to transgender for everybody.”

But, in almost all of his speeches, Trump reserved special ire for Talarico, or, as he referred to him in San Antonio, “Dumocrat Communist James Talafreako.” Perhaps Trump feels on the hook for the Texas Senate race, which most likely would have been easily won by the Republican incumbent, John Cornyn, had Trump not insisted on backing the scandal-plagued Paxton in the G.O.P. primary runoff. Whatever the reason, he seems to have saved up extra bile for Talarico, demeaning him as a “weak, gutless, self-hating, transgender-promoting freak show” who threatens to “destroy everything that we’ve built.”

I did not learn from Trump all that much about what nature of threat to the Republic Talarico poses, though I found it notable that, at several rallies, the President took off on rants about Talarico’s alleged veganism, accusing him of eating meat only in order to suck up to the meat-loving Texas electorate and thus causing himself to be “throwing up all over the place.” Trump liked the throwing-up line so much so he said it repeatedly, including to audiences in states where Talarico is not on the ballot. “He’s a vegan and all of a sudden he’s going to barbecues,” he said in Alabama. “What they don’t show you is that, after every barbecue, he walks to the back of a tent and he throws up all over the place.” He mentioned the supposed throwing up in Oklahoma, too, “because he’s a vegan, and you can’t get elected as a vegan in Oklahoma or in Texas.”

Nearly half the country was not alive the last time Texas elected a Democratic senator. And yet this is what Trump is talking about.

In 2018, the President closed with what seemed, at the time, a pretty crazy message: Vote for me and my party, because we’re the only ones who can stop the invasion of a caravan of brown people currently making their way toward our southern border. It was untrue, of course, yet also something of a model of clarity compared with this year’s parting thoughts from our President: Vote for me because high prices due to my policies don’t matter and also because, if you don’t, the Dumocrats will turn your kids into Communists and force them to have gender-reassignment surgery, unless they happen to live in Los Angeles, in which case the Iranians will nuke them. Got that? Twenty-six days to go. . . . ♦