At the end of one of his worst days in Washington, a triumphant President Trump strode onto the stage in a packed arena here to the adoration of thousands of supporters in a state where he scored one of most lopsided victories last fall.

“We’re in the heartland of America, and there is no place I would rather be than here with you tonight,” Trump thundered at the outset of a 42-minute speech, which included no mention of testimony earlier Monday that eviscerated his false claim of being wiretapped by President Barack Obama.

The visit to Kentucky was part of a striking pattern over his first two months as president: With few exceptions, whether for official business or campaign rallies, Trump heads only to states where he won.

Since his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump has traveled to Kentucky and Tennessee for large-scale rallies, to South Carolina to celebrate a new Boeing plane, to Pennsylvania to address fellow Republicans, and to Florida for multiple retreats at his Mar-a-Lago estate and for a tour of a Catholic school. Trump’s only trips outside the Washington area to states he lost have been to military installations or to play golf.

Trump is hardly the first president to include swing states on his itinerary with an eye toward the next election. But the degree to which he has chosen to return to places where he is most welcome — and his sagging poll numbers are not so pronounced — has no recent precedent, said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian and biographer.

Supporters wait for President Trump to arrive at a rally in Louisville on Monday. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

“It’s as if the campaign still hasn’t ended,” Dallek said. “What he doesn’t seem to understand — or doesn’t seem to care — is you work hard to bring the country together.”

Trump’s red-state travels as president follow a nine-state “thank you” tour after his election that included rallies only in states he won.

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The domestic travels of Vice President Pence also have heavily favored states where the Republican ticket prevailed, with several stops devoted to pitching the House GOP plan to overhaul the Affordable Care Act.

Pence’s red-state destinations have included Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida. The exceptions: a visit to West Point in New York and to the national gathering of a Jewish group in Nevada, a state the Trump-Pence ticket narrowly lost to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, principal White House deputy press secretary, said it should not be a surprise that the president is visiting more states where he won, given that there are more of them than those he lost. “The fact that he has spent more time in states he won is just understanding basic math,” she said.

Pence spokesman Marc Lotter said much of the vice president’s travel has been dictated by where groups that he addresses happen to be meeting.

(Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

A growing number of Democratic officials in blue states, however, question Trump’s commitment to representing the entire country.

Democrats already have decried several Trump proposals, including the health-care rollback that would halt a Medicaid expansion embraced by more governors in their party than by Republicans. And they worry that states Trump won also might get special consideration for promised infrastructure spending and federal office buildings.

“It’s like he wants to be a president for red America only,” said Maryland House Majority Leader C. William Frick (D-Montgomery). “No one’s holding their breath that he’s going to make it a priority to help places like Maryland, New York or California.”

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Trump’s only visits to Maryland since the election have been for flights on Air Force One originating at Joint Base Andrews and for a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering that happened to be at National Harbor, just down the Potomac River from Washington.

Blue-state partisans also point to other perceived slights.

In keeping with tradition, Trump recently welcomed the nation’s governors to the White House as part of a conference in Washington of the bipartisan National Governors Association. But during a question-and-answer session, Trump called almost exclusively on Republicans for queries, according to several people in the room.

“He should be soliciting perspectives from both Democrats and Republicans,” said Jared Leopold, communications director for the Democratic Governors Association, adding that doing so would be helped by travel to states that Trump lost.

Four of Trump’s recent predecessors, including Obama, made it to all 50 states by the time they left office. In Obama’s case, however, he did not hit his final state — South Dakota — until late in his eight-year tenure.

At both government and campaign events held out of state, Trump tends to reminisce about his performance in the campaign, sometimes at great length. And he routinely promises to bring jobs to the area he visits.

“This is a state I truly love,” Trump proclaimed during a rally last month in Melbourne, Fla. “This is a state where we all had a great victory together. . . . I’m here because I want to be among my friends and among the people.”

During a government-sponsored appearance last week outside Detroit focused on the auto industry, Trump similarly professed his love for Michigan, saying, “You did me a big favor, because you gave me a victory. . . . And you’re going to be very happy, believe me. You’re going to be very, very happy.”

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On Monday, the news coming out of Washington could hardly have been worse for the Trump administration: FBI Director James B. Comey testified to the House Intelligence Committee that he had no information to support statements by Trump on Twitter more than two weeks earlier that Obama had ordered surveillance of Trump Tower in New York.

Comey also confirmed publicly for the first time that the FBI is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, including possible coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.

None of that seemed to matter in Freedom Hall here, where Trump supporters packed into an arena with a stated capacity of more than 18,000 people. In November, Trump carried Kentucky with nearly 63 percent of the vote.

One of those who voted for him, Ed Sanders, a stained-glass maker wearing a red “Make America Great Again” cap, said he was not sure what to make of the president’s wiretapping allegations but felt sure “there must be something going on there.”

More broadly, Sanders, 63, said he thought Trump was off to a “good start — if people would leave him alone and let him do his job.”

After listening to several warm-up speakers, the crowd’s anticipation of Trump’s arrival led to “the wave” going around the arena to recordings of several of the rock anthems that were staples of Trump’s presidential campaign. The president appeared to a blaring recording of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

Following a speech that reprised many of his campaign promises, Trump took his time exiting the stage. He clapped as he walked, pausing every few steps to wave at the crowd.

Then he climbed into the presidential limousine, headed back to the less-friendly confines of Washington.