President Donald Trump’s ugly derision of Christine Blasey Ford in Mississippi this week was simultaneously loathsome and entirely predictable. “How did you get home? I don’t remember,” he said on Tuesday night, mocking Ford’s testimony last week against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. “How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know.” Trump, as usual, was playing to the worst instincts of a rowdy crowd that gleefully laughed along with him. But strikingly, they were all needling a 51-year-old woman who has spent decades grappling with the psychological and emotional fallout from a teenage sexual assault.

This is who Trump is, of course, and you could read it on the faces of the White House correspondents who went on television the next morning to dissect his speech. Despite calling Ford “credible” and “compelling” the preceding week, reporters knew the president was never going keep his actual thoughts to himself, because he never has, despite what his aides or Republicans on Capitol Hill want. It was the real Trump who spoke in Mississippi Tuesday, the one who has rarely expressed even a shred of empathy for the most vulnerable among us, whether it be immigrant children, the disabled, the poor, and especially the victims of sexual assault. Remember, it is the official position of the White House that every single one of the women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct are liars. All 16 of them.

And yet: Trump’s electoral success is derived from his ability to surf his own pure instinct, however crude or impolitic, and translate it into a weirdly ad-hoc political strategy. He knows that the Kavanaugh saga is shaping up to be exactly the kind of thing that motivates the kind of voter that brought him to the Oval Office in the first place—the aging white man. So why would he not take Kavanaugh’s side in the most Trump-y way imaginable? Aside from his elite credentials and Bethesda, Maryland, bearing, Kavanaugh himself is something of a stand-in for the Republican voter in the age of Trump—a white, fiftysomething man, furious that what he feels is owed to him might be slipping away thanks to sinister forces at work in our culture. A white guy in a competitive Senate state like Texas, North Dakota, Florida, or West Virginia can surely identify with a man who may have done something stupid in high school or college, but doesn’t think it should ruin his life.

Trump, the mad puppet master of identity politics, knows this. Sixty-two percent of white men voted for him in 2016, and he is counting on his enormous support among non-college-educated white men to carry Republicans through in November. “It is a very scary time for young men in America, where you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of,” Trump said earlier on Tuesday, before his rally. “This is a very difficult time. What’s happening here has much more to do than even the appointment of a Supreme Court justice.” Those remarks would not get a person invited to the Aspen Ideas Festival, but to the legions of dudes who spent last weekend shouting “I LIKE BEER” at pretty much every N.F.L. and college-football game, his comments probably didn’t sound very controversial at all. Saturdays are for the boys, after all.

Midterm elections are always a head-to-head matchup between the party’s two bases, and Republicans are playing defense in almost every respect. With college-educated women trending toward the Democrats in a huge way, opening up what could be being the biggest gender gap in American political history, Trump is left to do what he does best: stoke the anxieties of Republican men. So, since decency has no quarter in the Oval Office these days, why not jet to Mississippi for a night and attack a female victim from the presidential podium? There’s a lot of white men in Mississippi—and two Senate races this year as well.