Donald Trump’s 2015 announcement speech is now remembered for his descent down the Trump Tower escalator, the hired claque of supporters and the wild accusation that Mexico was exporting rapists across the border.

With four years’ hindsight, never-Trump voters might look back at that speech with the same shudder of fear that horror movie fans have when a favorite character starts to go outside alone to check what that noise was.

But in the inner sanctums of Trump world, it is also possible to imagine that a presidential speechwriter could see in that 2015 speech the germ of a re-election campaign.

“Promises delivered” is one of the oldest tropes in politics. And if you squint, you can see how these 2015 lines might work for Trump today: “Our country needs a truly great leader … that can bring back our jobs, can bring back our manufacturing, can bring back our military, can take care of our vets.”

Another president – blessed with the buoyant economy that Barack Obama bequeathed to his successor – might have crafted a re-election campaign filled with sunny skies and beaming faces.

Maybe instead of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “It’s morning in America”, Trump might have claimed: “It’s morning in my America”. Or the real estate huckster president could have concocted his own 21st-century version of Harold Macmillan’s “You’ve never had it so good”.

But Trump, judging from his Orlando kick-off rally, lacks the flexibility and the self-awareness to ever change. Like the half-century-old Rolling Stone songs played at his rallies, Trump is locked into the politics of nostalgia. But what he misses is not some mythical Golden Age America, but the glorious freedom – with no constraints based on morals, truth, taste or the demands of state – of his own 2016 campaign.

With 23 Democrats running for president, why else would Trump reserve his bitterest invective for that rare public figure who is not in the race: Hillary Clinton? Trump must have reveled in the way that his fiercest Republican critics during the 2016 primaries have become spineless supplicants. In Orlando, he rewarded them with a brief moment of Trumpian favor as he described Senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio as “really brilliant, tough, wonderful friends who have helped me so much”.

Other presidents campaigning for re-election have demonized their opponents, sometimes with a sharp edge.

Running for a second term, Franklin Roosevelt decried the reactionary business and financial leaders who opposed every part of the New Deal to battle the Depression. “Never before in our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” Roosevelt declared three days before the 1936 election.

“They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”

But no president, until Trump, has ever assailed his critics as not merely wrong or greedy but rather as un-American and unpatriotic. In one of the more vicious lines of his presidency, Trump snarled in Orlando: “Our radical Democratic opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage and want to destroy you – and they want to destroy our country as we know it.”

In Trump’s apocalyptic worldview, everything is at risk because the enemies are always at the gates

In Trump’s apocalyptic worldview, everything is at risk because the enemies are always at the gates. Invoking the supposed protection from his “beautiful” wall, Trump said darkly: “Can you imagine those caravans without the barriers and walls that we have already put up … This country would be a mess like you wouldn’t believe.”

Trump’s speechwriters provided him with a pat-yourself-on-the-back list of upbeat economic indicators that he dutifully read off a teleprompter. But it seemed obvious that Trump was bored reciting lines such as: “If you take a look at the African American community, how much progress they have made – the lowest unemployment numbers in the history of our country.”

Fear remains the operating principle of the Trump presidency. Not Roosevelt’s “freedom from fear”, but instead constantly seeing a phantom menace where none exist. Maybe its roots are psychological for Trump – from fears that his father didn’t love him to fears that his tower of lies will soon collapse.

Trump fails to recognize that fearmongering works best for candidates when they are out of power.

Four years after the Trump Tower speech, it is hard for a sitting president to again conjure up the dread specter of “Crooked Hillary” and hapless Obama. But, despite Trump’s rhetoric, it seems a stretch that most up-for-grabs voters in the midwest will ever feel personally threatened by caravans of desperate asylum seekers on the Mexican border or Iranian naval maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz.