The rallies had ceased to be the curiosity they were at first. Out of basic psychological necessity, if nothing else, the country was learning to metabolize the Trump presidency’s daily news barrage, of which the rallies were but one minor component, another assaultive stream of words and images entering the public consciousness in a disembodied, decontextualized way: Here was Trump, shouting somewhere. At the events, you would be reminded, with some surprise, that these moments occurred at fixed coordinates in space and time, as opposed to simply materializing in the news cycle in which the country was now trapped, 24 hours a day, by virtue of Trump’s own unwavering attention to it.

By the time Trump got to Cedar Rapids, the rallies had acquired an informal template. There was an often agreeably random opening (wrestlers?), some pleasantries (in Iowa, shout-outs to Karen Handel, who had just beaten Jon Ossoff in a special congressional election in Georgia, and Steve Scalise, who had just been shot at a softball game), a brief tour through the headlines (North Korea). Then Trump would begin reciting what sounded like a conventional prepared speech, only to immediately digress from it: “Here are just some of the historic accomplishments we have achieved in just a very short period of time — and I have to just preface it by saying — thank you, darling — I have to preface it by saying, you know, I’ve been watching, they’re saying” — his voice deepening into an impression of an anchorman’s scold — “ ‘President Trump has not produced health care.’ You know,” he said, leaning in with a conspiratorial, can-you-believe-these-guys? look, “I’ve been there for five months! If you remember, during the Clinton period, they worked for years and years and years and never got health care. Obama” — here there were boos, and Trump paused briefly to enjoy them — “though after listening to that testimony, I fully understand. But President Obama, his whole administration, pushing, pushing for Obamacare, which has now failed. In fact, I was just told by your great governor, and ex-governor, that your insurance companies have all fled the state of Iowa.”

The texture of this was familiar to anyone who watched Trump during the campaign. The conventional speech was there, nominally, a formal structure around which Trump improvised, embroidering it with anecdotes that may or may not have happened, turning over parts of the speech in the light and opening up the back end of it to show the audience, to let them in on the secrets, to convey a sense that he was leveling with the people who had the good sense to be there at that moment, offering a sensation of truth if not always the complete thing (Iowa’s state health-insurance exchange had lost most of its providers, but not all of them). It was fun to listen to, because Trump — and this is still perhaps the most incredible thing about his candidacy, in retrospect — was somehow the first politician in however many decades of modern American political oratory to capitalize on the fact that nobody likes listening to modern American political oratory.

There was also a dissonance to these speeches, however, now that Trump had settled into his presidency. Before the election, his subversion of the forms of American politics served to underscore the basic argument of his campaign, which was that America’s problems could be solved easily if you overthrew the country’s governing class, with all their idiocies of convention. But Trump and his voters had done exactly that, and America’s problems had not instantly disappeared. One of Trump’s more reliable impulses is evading responsibility, and he spent much of these speeches herding together the scapegoats — the media, the recalcitrant Democrats, the F.B.I., the system — who might account for his situation, without appearing to realize that he was drawing the self-portrait of a man who had wanted power but gotten authority instead.

On Aug. 12, white supremacists marched and then rioted in Charlottesville, Va., one of them running over a woman with his car and killing her. Asked about the episode in a news conference at Trump Tower, Trump insisted that “I think there’s blame on both sides” and described some of the white supremacists as “very fine people,” and amid the backlash that inevitably ensued, Donald J. Trump for President Inc. awakened, as it seems to do in times of trouble, to announce that on Aug. 22, there would be another rally, this one in Phoenix.

The afternoon before the rally, I was settling into my seat in an American Airlines Airbus on the runway in Charlotte, N.C., when the pilot got on the intercom: “If everyone could take their seats quickly, please,” he said, a note of apologetic bewilderment in his voice, “we’re trying to beat Air Force One into Phoenix today.” Trump, he explained, was due into Phoenix around the same time we were. “If we don’t get in ahead of them, we’re going to be put in a holding pattern.”