In Georgia, on Sunday, when he still had four more rallies to attend before the midterms—in Tennessee that day, and in Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri on Monday—President Donald Trump told a story that summed up much of what he seems to think he is getting in return for the time he has spent on the road. Maybe it was a fairy tale. It began, Trump said, when he was backstage, and encountered “a very, very powerful guy—big, strong guy—with tears coming down in his face.” The big man said, “ ‘Thank you, Mr. President, for saving our country.’ ” According to Trump, “This happens all the time. This happens all the time. ‘Thank you.’ Tears! Tears!” Trump drew two fingers downward in front of his cheeks, and continued, “I said, ‘When was the last time you cried?’ He said, ‘I don’t know that I ever cried.’ Even as a baby this guy didn’t cry. But he was crying backstage. I mean, tears are coming down, thanking me. And it’s true! We turned the country around. The country was going down.” Another hand gesture: a whirl, like water going down the drain, or the signal at the end of a magic trick.

Did it happen just that way? Does it happen all the time? It is hard to know if that matters to Trump, compared with his essential message: rallies are a time for gratitude, for paying homage. For the crowds, that is perhaps supposed to be empowering and enthralling; they, with their presence, get to be called “very, very powerful.” In the final rally on Monday night, in Missouri, Trump summoned his daughter to the stage (“Ivanka, say a few words—come, honey”) and, with a trilling laugh, she said, “Hi, Missouri! We love you, we love you! So much love!” There were also appearances by Rush Limbaugh (“These rallies!” Limbaugh, a native of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where the rally was held, told the crowd, as it swung toward a chant of “Lock her up”); Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, of Fox News (a dose of celebrity, and a reminder of the network’s supportive function); Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary; and Kellyanne Conway. As Ivanka walked offstage, Trump riffed on the idea of élites. “I know all the élites. They’re not very smart, in many cases. They have a lot of hatred in their heart,” he told the crowd, and then continued, “We have better houses, homes, boats. We do better than they do, we work harder than they do, we make more money than they do. You—we—are the super élites.”

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Who are “they”—who aren’t very smart, who hate, who don’t have nice houses—supposed to be? At each rally, Trump talked about “the mob” that hated America, and the Democrats who led it. In Missouri, he said that Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat who is widely recognized as a moderate, would push a “horrible socialist agenda.” In Ohio, he said, of Richard Cordray, the Democratic candidate for governor and the former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “This guy Cordray is a bad guy, not a good person; he’s hurt a lot of people; what he’s done to people is a disgrace.” (The source of Trump’s bitter invective is, apparently, Cordray’s association with Senator Elizabeth Warren.) In Georgia, he said that the election of Stacey Abrams as governor would mean agents coming door to door to seize each household’s guns. He added, “You put Stacey in there and you’re going to have Georgia turn into Venezuela.” In Tennessee, he said, “They want to impose socialism on our country. And they want to erase America’s borders. Democrats want to invite caravan after caravan of illegal aliens to pour into our country. I don’t think so!”

He continued, pointing to the cameras at the back of the room, “I don't care what they say. I don’t care what the fake media says. That’s an invasion of our country!” He was interrupted by a chant of “Build that wall! Build that wall!” before continuing, “If you want more caravans and more crime—because crime comes with it—vote for the Democrats!”

At rally after rally, Trump talked about how electing the Democrats would turn Georgia or Tennessee or Missouri or the whole country into “a giant sanctuary city” to shelter, as he put it in Georgia, “predators,” or, as he said in Indiana, where he was appearing to support Mike Braun in his effort to defeat Senator Joe Donnelly, one of the most vulnerable Democrats, “drug dealers, gang members, MS-13 killers.” And, at stop after stop, he talked about how the Democrats were supposedly inducing immigrants to come with offers of “free welfare”; what he meant by that is anyone’s guess.

The Democrats want to welcome immigrants for their own insidious reasons, Trump said. “They want them to vote. ‘Come on in and vote!’ They love them voting,” he said in Tennessee. This idea was like a drumbeat. It contained both the notion of a demographic shift and of phantom voter fraud. Trump has no hesitation about ginning up bigotry or conspiratorial fears that the electoral system has been compromised. “Most of all, they want them to vote,” he said in Indiana, adding, “There’s only one way to stop this assault on American sovereignty. You have to vote tomorrow. You have to!”

The ostensible point of all of these rallies is to help Republicans keep control of Congress and to win some key governorships, which, because of the state governments’ role in drawing districts, could help to win future Congresses. He closed the rally tour in Missouri and Indiana, because the Senate races there are, essentially, tossups. Part of the reason the Democrats are at risk—Trump, at least, seem to think so—is that McCaskill and Donnelly, as he put it, “joined the Democrat mob in voting against Justice Kavanaugh.” In McCaskill’s case, he said, “Just like she didn’t vote for Judge Kavanaugh, she’s not going to vote for us. And that’s the way it is.”

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As the rallies progressed, Trump’s rhetoric about Brett Kavanaugh got more extreme. In Georgia, he mentioned that a woman on the far margins of the story, who had claimed to be the author of an anonymous letter accusing Kavanaugh of rape, had admitted that she had never known him at all, calling her “No. 4,” and wondering what else said about Kavanaugh might be proved false. (Kavanaugh has denied all the accusations against him.) By the time Trump got to Missouri, she had become “the accuser,” and the news was that “it was a scam; it was all fake.” He said, of Kavanaugh, “He hung in there. And I hung in there, too, by they way. I hung in there. False accusations, false accusations!”

By Wednesday morning, we’ll know better who all this helped and who it hurt. Trump did give the Republicans he was supporting some time onstage. But it is striking that, when he did, their prime task seemed to be to support Trump. Both Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee, and Brian Kemp, who is running against Abrams in Georgia, thanked the crowds for voting for the President. At each rally, Trump pointed out the Republican office holders in the audience—there was always a small crowd of them. Their presence, and their applause for Trump, served to validate him—to show anyone watching that the honor he was afforded was just and right. (Similarly, when Trump talked about the economy—he tended to frame it in ways that communicated how he, personally, was praised for its progress, with vignettes about foreign leaders and “kings and queens and princes” who had purportedly expressed their wonder and admiration.) The point of the rallies, after all, is Trump, which is another way of saying that the point is the 2020 election.

“He has delivered for this state!” Josh Hawley, who is running against McCaskill, said, at the Missouri rally. Hawley’s case for himself consisted of a list of times McCaskill had voted against Trump’s interests, or was “just like Hillary,” or had “mocked” the President. Hawley would never do that. “We’re going to reëlect him!” Hawley said. “Four more years!” the crowd chanted, as a man who was still hoping for six in the Senate nodded, clapped, and looked, with a smile, toward the President.