A concise outline of President Donald Trump’s reëlection campaign might be drawn from the chants that a crowd in Duluth, Minnesota, picked up during his rally there Wednesday night. The chants started early, after Trump, pointing his finger, admonished “those very dishonest people back there—the fake news,” and the crowd responded with a round of “CNN sucks! CNN sucks!” The specific crime of those “dishonest people” was not appreciating the triumph of his Korea summit. Tens of millions might have died, Trump said, if not for his ability to get along with Kim Jong Un. Instead, he said, “Right now you are so safe . . . And all over Asia, they are celebrating.” (It was the rare rally where the simple declamation of the place name “Singapore”—where the summit had been held—could set off a wave of cheering.) But the media were hiding the peace and the love, creating a fake conflict that Trump alone could resolve.

Then, a little later, came the chant “Build the wall! Build the wall!,” after Trump had said that if only there weren’t so many undocumented immigrants there would be much more money to spend on rural areas, “inner cities,” schools, and roads. That, too, will be an election theme: you could be rich and cared for, you could know the truth, but they won’t let you. (This theme echoes the case for Brexit, which was sold to the British people partly on the promise of a bonanza for the National Health Service.) “They” included Democrats, whom he called the party of “open borders,” saying that they wanted to “ ‘let everybody come in, let everybody pour in—We don’t care, let them come in from the Middle East, let them come in from all over the place!’ ” He added, “Democrats don’t care about the impact of uncontrolled migration on your communities, your schools, your hospitals, your jobs, or your safety. Democrats put illegal immigrants before they put American citizens. What the hell is going on?” That last phrase was in the key of conspiratorialism, in which a Trump campaign always plays.

Trump made no apologies for his policy that had forced the separation of migrant children from their parents, but hastened to assure the crowd that, even though he had, that day, signed an executive order putting a brake on the practice, conditions at the border would be “just as tough.” (And, since the executive order calls for holding children in immigration detention centers—in jail, in effect—indefinitely, despite legal precedents protecting them, there may be something to that boast.) Rather than talking about the children, he bragged about deporting members of the MS-13 gang: “And actually, can you believe I have to say this”—a cue, from Trump, that he is about to say something you can’t believe—“we have liberated towns—liberated, like, like it was captured by a foreign country. We have liberated towns out in Long Island!” This is a domestic doubling-down on his claim, during the 2016 campaign, that parts of Paris were out of the control of local authorities. It is true that the borders between Nassau and Suffolk counties are remarkably porous. But what, exactly, looks so foreign out there to Trump, the liberator of Long Island?

And then the crowd joined in an indiscernible collection of shouts to silence a heckler. “Goodbye, darling!” Trump said as the protester was removed. Such interludes seem destined to be a regular feature in 2020, as they were in 2016. Indeed, Trump assured the crowd of repeats from those days. “Remember the original speech?” he said, at one point, referring to the announcement of his campaign, in 2015, during which he said that Mexico was sending Americans “rapists.” “Remember those words? Everyone said, ‘Oh, how terrible.’ ” But Trump knew that he was right, “and we’re sending them the hell back.” The event was meant to show his support for local Republican congressional candidates—he invited them up on the stage at one point—but was more defined by his belief that winning Minnesota, in 2020, would be “really easy.” He lost it in 2016, by about forty thousand votes; just “one more visit, one more speech,” he said, and he believed he would have taken it. There will be a lot of one-more-speeches in 2020.

A Crisis at the Border More coverage of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy from The New Yorker.

A subsequent refrain followed what might be called Trump’s song of himself. “The élite? Why are they élite?” he began. “I have a much better apartment than they do, I’m smarter than they are, I’m richer than they are, I became President and they didn’t, and I’m representing the greatest, smartest, most loyal, best people on earth—the ‘deplorables,’ remember that?” The crowd seemed to: the response to his call was “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” The lines between self-aggrandizement, self-pity, and xenophobia are rarely as smudged as they are at a Trump rally.

That was made clear with the next chant, too. “Have you been watching what’s been going on with the inspector general’s report—what a scam this whole thing is?” Trump asked, referring to an F.B.I. study that he claims makes short work of the core premise of the Russia investigation. (It does not.) “Lock her up! Lock her up!” the crowd chanted—reflecting the Trump strategy of answering whatever Robert Mueller, the special counsel, comes up with by angrily changing the subject to Hillary Clinton—“Crooked Hillary,” as he called her, once more, in Duluth. He asked, again, “Have you been seeing this whole scam? Do you believe what you’re seeing?” It is a question that anyone might ask after any Trump appearance.

Trump’s fixation with the past reaches beyond Hillary Clinton. He seemed, in Duluth, less concerned with whether he was a great President—a settled question, in his mind—than whether he was, really, the greatest ever. He had done things that “they’ve” been trying to do “since before the days of Ronald Reagan—couldn’t get it done.” (His example was allowing more drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.) He had eliminated more regulations than any President, even the “sixteen-year President.” (There has never been such a person; Franklin D. Roosevelt, though elected to four terms, died early in the fourth one.) And the credit for the economy, now at “the most successful level that the country has ever seen,” was his alone. “I hear a couple of the fakers the other day said, “Well, I think it’s Obama’s economy,’ ” he said, adopting the stuffy voice he uses when mimicking a generic journalist. “Obama’s economy? Obama?” Trump spread his arms, as if to enfold the crowd in an embrace of bitter astonishment.

There was a final chant. After a tribute to Minnesota’s pioneers and to “our beautiful ancestors”—immigrants, many of them, although he didn’t mention that—Trump said, “We’re reopening NASA!” It is already open, but never mind that, either. The crowd began chanting “SPACE Force!” a reference to Trump’s proposal to reorganize the military along interplanetary lines. But the cadence inverted the phrase, so that it sounded like “Force SPACE! Force SPACE!” Phrases and people get jostled in a crowd, when Trump speaks, and it stops being clear what word or what value, in America, comes first.