Hello! This week I’m in Erie, Pa., where I’ve just been to one of the more arresting spectacles of the 2018 election calendar: a campaign rally featuring President Trump.

President Trump loves rallies! He loves the adoration of the crowds who attend his rallies! He traveled here at the very moment Hurricane Michael was barreling across Florida because, he said, remaining in Washington to monitor the storm’s devastation “would have been very, very unfair to thousands of people” waiting to see him in Erie.

These events, which he has been attending frequently as the midterms approach and which consist of crowds of fans cheering and chanting while he promotes local candidates (and himself), are not unique to him; President Barack Obama had his fair share, too.

But Mr. Trump is different, as much carnival barker, showman and self-promoter as politician, particularly when he wanders off-piste and into extemporaneous soliloquies about his favorite topics: the superiority of Donald J. Trump and the evilness of Donald J. Trump’s enemies. (This second group includes the Fake News media, Hillary Clinton and “the radical Democratic mob,” i.e., the Democrats.)