There it was: the positivity, not a promise or a prediction. A fact.

“I guarantee you this: Nobody, and I mean nobody, is gonna mess with us anymore.” “U.S.A.,” the crowd chanted. “I love you too,” Trump crooned. “I love you! I love you!” Trump! Trump! Winning, now. “Nafta,” he sneered. The crowd booed. “We will make great deals!” The crowd cheered. Trump deals: “You do ’em one at a time, folks,” he said, mincing, holding his thumb and finger apart to show something small, deals he would crush as he had Marco Rubio. “One at a time,” he said, putting one down and picking one up: Little Vietnam, Little Japan. “One at a time. And if they misbehave” — the crowd’s cue to laugh — “if they don’t treat us properly, we terminate. We put ’em in the shed. And then” — he shrugged — “maybe they come back.”

Everything was winning from then on. He took out “The Snake” — it appeared to be handwritten — and drove by the question of temperament (“Act presidential! Act presidential!” he said, mimicking his wife, Melania, and his daughter Ivanka).

But then, instead of reading “The Snake,” he opted to make “The Call.” He put his fist to his ear like a phone. “Hello? This is the president,” he said, like a boy making a prank call. He didn’t even need to tell the crowd what he would say next. “It’s so much fun for me!” he cried. “I love doing it! Please don’t take that away!”

Take it away? They planned to give it to him: the power to Make. That. Call.

“So I call up,” he continued. “I say, ‘Listen, here’s the story.’ ” He’ll tell the executive on the other end — this time from Carrier, the air-conditioner company that recently announced plans to lay off 1,400 people and build a factory in Mexico — that he has seen pictures of their new facility, he loves it, it’s beautiful, but, again, “here’s the story”: Every A/C that comes across the border will be taxed 35 percent.

“And I will get a call within 24 hours,” Trump went on, exultant. “And he will say to me, the head of Carrier, he will say, ‘Mr. President, we’ve decided to stay in the United States.’ ”

The crowd cheered, as if it had already happened. Which, in a sense peculiar to the church of Trump — in which in the ecstasy of confidence itself is the ultimate win — it might as well have.

To the right of me, the crowd rippled: hands in the air, pushing a small circle of young black men and a white boy with a “Dump Trump” T-shirt, hands ripping it off him. I squeezed closer. One of the black men hurtled sideways, falling into the man in front of me, and like dominoes we started to go down. The press of bodies kept me standing, but my arm swung behind me, and I hit an old woman. She smiled at me, neither hurt nor afraid.

When I looked again, the fight was gone. So, too, the disrupters, tugged away by security. We flowed into the empty space, that much closer to Trump, who rolled on, deep into a crescendo of victories. In every aspect of our lives, he said; so much, he said, at every level, all the time. The memory of the fight dissolved into his tide of good feeling, as if the dream of violence, Trump’s and the crowd’s, had simply been a prelude for the winning to come. It was filling them already, now that the losers were gone, vanished, as if loss itself had been disappeared.