“What are we going to do?” he asked the crowd. They stood on the unfilled floor of the chilly arena, a sea of upraised heads dotted with red hats, chins upturned to him in rapt attention, like flowers to sunlight; they sat or stood in the bottom tier of seats. It was, from the sight of it, a more suburban than blue-collar demographic, women in plaid scarves and men in fleece jackets. Trump answered his rhetorical question: “We’re going to make America great again—you watch!”

For a year and a half, since he began his presidential campaign, America has been watching Donald Trump, in awe or in horror, always in fascination. For a year and a half, nothing really changed: the gleeful, freewheeling style, the vulgar provocations, and the outrageous tweets; the perpetual war with enemies real and imagined, including, perhaps especially, his own party; or the manufactured facts, the bragging about the polls, the assertion, over and over, whether or not it was true in the moment, that he was winning—until it became true.

Trump is a salesman, and what he saw from the beginning was that politics was a sales game, just like business, where his name was worth as much or more than anything he built. He learned early on in the Republican primary that he could rile up voters and turn them on his rivals, and the other politicians would have to kneel before him or become irrelevant. As he assembles his administration, the same patterns are on display: feuding underlings, supplicants publicly vying for his favor, a divided country trying to figure out what he’ll do next. But the answer may be right in front of our noses: He is going to keep doing exactly what he’s always done.

More “thank you” rallies are scheduled for this week, in North Carolina and Iowa and Michigan. It is not customary for the winners of American presidential elections to continue campaigning after the election is over, just as it is not customary to publicly audition potential Cabinet members, to make phone calls that trample diplomatic sensitivities, or to include one’s children-slash-business-partners in presidential matters. But Trump always promised to upend the customary order of things, and to hear him tell it, he is already winning.

Just before the rally in Cincinnati, he had gone to Indiana and announced a deal with the makers of Carrier air-conditioning that would, he claimed, keep jobs in America. The quibblers quibbled, the critics criticized: In fact, they insisted, a bunch of jobs would still be going to Mexico; it was not a real win for American jobs like he claimed. Conservatives from the Wall Street Journal to Sarah Palin decried the deal as anti-market. Trump ignored them and made the sale. “What happened today in Indiana, we’re going to do all over the country,” he said, and the crowd cheered.