“I need to open with a very critical breaking-news announcement,” Donald Trump told a crowd in a hotel ballroom in Manchester, New Hampshire, today. The news that the F.B.I. had discovered more e-mails related to Hillary Clinton’s case had spread through the room a few minutes earlier, and as Trump, his voice grave, parcelled out what he knew the audience cheered in anticipation; it already knew where his story was heading.

“Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before,” Trump said. “We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.” The audience chanted, “Lock her up!” That gave way to a chant about Washington in general: “Drain the swamp!” Trump said that the news was so big his advisers had suggested that he scrap the Manchester event. He expressed some ambivalence about giving his speech, because after the news it must seem “so boring.” The old electric feeling of Trump rallies was back: the sense that in this place something important was happening. He asked the crowd whether he should continue, and of course they shouted yes, and of course he did.

A weird inversion was taking place: Trump suddenly found much to praise in the establishment that he had previously, darkly insisted was out to get him. He applauded the “courage” of the F.B.I. to “right the horrible mistake that they made” in closing the investigation this summer. He described his “great respect” for the Bureau and said that he thought this would “save their great reputation.” He expressed optimism that “perhaps, finally, justice will be done.” The system, Trump said, “might not be as rigged as I thought.”

Trump took the news as a validation of what he has been saying throughout the campaign: that Hillary Clinton is corrupt, that she belongs in prison, and that he is bound to win. He said that he had been trying to explain Clinton’s corruption to voters, but that many of his lines were too arcane to stick. The ones that worked, he said, were about the thirty-three thousand e-mails she had “bleached,” and the phones she had destroyed, “many with a hammer”: concrete images helped. Now, with today’s news, Trump had another way of describing her violations that would be obvious to everyone. His speech was short by his standards, and energetic: there were none of the recent detours into grudges and dark premonitions.

It had been a few weeks since I had seen a Trump rally, and I was curious whether the crowd had changed, whether, as the election neared and the polls turned against him, his supporters had become harder and more isolated. I could see no change. There was the same surreal mashup of anger and grievance, on the one hand, and a regular Republican event, on the other. Someone was waving around a strange Hillary Clinton effigy: a white doll with a photo of her face attached to it, with a crown made of sticks. There were the usual T-shirt slogans: “Hillary for Prison,” “Deplorable Me.” But in the back of the ballroom a group of businessmen in performance fleece were wearing stickers and pins touting Chris Sununu, the moderate Republican candidate for governor. Bob Smith, the former New Hampshire senator, who previously supported Ted Cruz, was working the crowd. He introduced Trump and told the room not to pay any mind to the polls. A pastor gave the benediction “In Jesus’ name.” He had a strong New England accent, and when he praised the police it sounded as though he were talking about “lore enforcement.”

“Lore enforcement” pretty well describes what was happening. Trump’s plane, delayed in New York, had been late getting into town, and left the crowd standing around for an hour and a half. John Sununu, Chris’s father, who served as the governor of New Hampshire and as George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, filled some of the time by giving the crowd talking points for persuading people to vote for Trump. No. 1 was Hillary Clinton—“just Hillary herself,” Sununu said, as if that would be reason enough. The possibility raised today in Manchester is that maybe it will be. Eleven days before the election, his rallies spent indulging his own wounds, Trump had been struggling along without a closing argument. Now he had one: Hillary’s corruption. Each of the sixteen other Republican Presidential candidates dreamed of making that case. The d.j. seemed to sense the moment. As Trump left the stage, the sound system played the old Rolling Stones song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”: “But if you try sometimes / you just might find / you get what you need.”