After another week of White House scandals, Donald Trump vented his frustrations Saturday in a swaggering, unscripted campaign speech in Moon Township, Pennsylvania: a 73-minute whirlwind of taunts, insults, and vulgarity—and, occasionally, words of praise for the man he was there to support, congressional candidate Rick Saccone. The stakes for Tuesday’s special election couldn’t be higher for the Republican Party. Despite pouring millions into a district that Trump won by 20 points, Saccone is barely ahead of Democratic candidate Conor Lamb in a race that Republican lawmakers fear could augur a blue wave in November. “If the Democrats were to prevail in western Pennsylvania, that would be quite an earthquake,” Rep. Charlie Dent said last week. “If a strong pro-Trump district like this goes the other way, it would send a bad signal around the country in districts far more competitive than this one.”

For Trump, it’s not just Republican control of the House that’s in danger. If Democrats manage to retake the lower chamber, it’s also Trump’s presidency that would face an existential threat: impeachment. “We have to defeat Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters, a very low-IQ individual,” Trump said. “You ever see her? . . . ‘We will impeach him.’ She’s a low-IQ individual. You can’t help it. She really is.” The underlying fear crept in again and again. “Here’s the thing: we’re dealing with people that want to obstruct. They want to stop us from doing things,” Trump said of Democrats. “The task for everyone here tonight is to make sure that this great American comeback continues. Full speed ahead.”

Trump occasionally mentioned Saccone, calling him “handsome” and insulting his opponent as “Lamb the sham.” But, for the most part, the speech was a vehicle for Trump to talk about Trump. “Don’t forget, this got us elected,” Trump said of his casual, seat-of-the-pants speaking style. “If I came like a stiff, you guys wouldn’t come here tonight.” He also revealed his new slogan for the 2020 campaign: “Keep America Great!” He said that he’d “love to beat Oprah” and that he knows “her weakness.”

Foreign enemies, too, occupied Trump’s mind. He raged against Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto for refusing to pay for a border wall: “I said: ‘Are you crazy?’ . . . I said: ‘Bye-bye. We’re not making a deal.’” North Korea, he said, was “tough,” and “should have been handled . . . and everybody will say it, too. But that’s O.K. Because that’s what we do: we handle things.” He threatened to fight a trade war with the European Union over his tariffs on steel and aluminum: ”We’re gonna tax Mercedes Benz. We’re gonna tax BMW.” He reiterated that drug dealers ought to get the death penalty, criticized sanctuary cities for not cooperating with the Justice Department, and called for an end to “chain migration.”

As is typical at any Trump rally, the president delighted in re-litigating the 2016 election—and, also typically, got key facts wrong. “Women! We love you! We love you. Hey, didn’t we surprise them with women during the election? Remember? ‘Women won’t like Donald Trump.’ I said, ‘Have I really had that kind of a problem?’ I don’t think so.” Trump claimed he got 52 percent of the women’s vote, which is only true if you exclude all non-white voters. Exit polls show that Trump won only 25 percent of Hispanic women, and just 4 percent of black women.

And, of course, no presidential public appearance would be complete without the usual attack on the “fake” media. “Fake as hell CNN. The worst. So fake! Fake news,” Trump ranted. “Their ratings are lousy, by the way, compared to Fox.” In one particularly bizarre, stream-of-consciousness moment, he referred to Meet the Press host Chuck Todd as a “sleeping son of a bitch.”

The freewheeling performance was the first of its kind since the resignations of White House aides Hope Hicks and Gary Cohn, both of whom acted as checks on some of Trump’s worst impulses. Hicks, as Trump’s communications director and longtime confidante, served as a sounding board and “security blanket”; Cohn, as Trump’s chief economic adviser, made it his goal to tamp down Trump’s protectionist instincts. With both exiting, the Trump presidency is entering a new phase, as my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported last week—“one in which Trump is feeling liberated to act on his impulses” and defy his advisers.

According to five Republicans close to the White House, Trump is preparing to execute a “clean reset” of his senior staff in the coming weeks, as part of a larger effort to wrest control from aides he believes have been holding him back. Saturday’s rally was, perhaps, the first look at this new, unconstrained Trump.