The citizens of New Hampshire have lived with their opioid crisis for so long that the language of recovery has permeated politics in the state, among both Republicans and Democrats. On Monday, about an hour before the President delivered a speech in Manchester revealing his Administration’s policy responses to the opioid issue, I spoke on the phone with John Lyons, a prominent Republican attorney in Portsmouth and the former state chair of both John McCain’s and Jeb Bush’s Presidential campaigns. Lyons mentioned that though he himself had been “very fortunate” that no one in his immediate family had become addicted, many of his close friends had not been so fortunate. Just about everyone in New Hampshire, he said, viewed the opioid crisis as universal. “It has affected professional people of means as well as people who put on their bluejeans and go to work,” he said. In New Hampshire, a very small, very white state that has been flooded with tens of millions of prescription pain pills, the problem has prompted introspection. “It’s not being looked at as if it’s an increase in crime, or those people who don’t take care of their kids,” Lyons said. “It’s very much seen as the public-health problem it is.”

Donald Trump’s Presidency has been so partisan and circumscribed—so concentrated in Washington, and on the defense of orthodox Republican ideas and the settling of petty feuds—that it is unusual to see Trump in the more mundane position required by the opioid epidemic, picking his way through a problem on which neither party has a clear view and about which we are still gathering evidence. Some of that uncertainty crept into his address in Manchester, in which he promised, somewhat unexpectedly, that the Department of Justice would seek to bring cases against the pharmaceutical companies that had pushed opioids, and that his Administration would increase funding for treatment for individuals being released from prison. He praised efforts to get overdose-treatment drugs like Narcan into the hands of first responders and onto the campuses of colleges and universities. “I’ve seen people that are just about dead wake up,” the President said. These programs were largely cribbed from the Obama Administration, but Trump seemed invested in them, and in the projection of empathy. He beckoned a couple, Jim and Jeanne Moser, up to the podium to talk about their son, who had died from an overdose. “Beautiful son,” Trump insisted, not ungently.

Even so, the President’s focus strayed. “Toughness is what they most fear,” Trump said, when he got to the part of his speech about drug dealers. Among his policy proposals, he wanted the death penalty extended to apply to drug dealers, and he made his case even though opioid country had not reacted warmly to the idea. (“Totally irrational,” a police chief who leads an opioid task force in southern Ohio insisted.) But Trump needs familiar villains. He blamed the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, whose population is nearly three-quarters Hispanic, for supplying Fentanyl to New Hampshire, and then segued into a discussion of the street gang MS-13 (“They don’t use guns—they would rather use knives because it takes longer and is more painful”), though it had no obvious connection to the opioid epidemic. He insisted that nations that punish drug traffickers with the death penalty (“I won’t mention the names—you know the countries”) had no drug problem at all. The specific crisis of opioids in New Hampshire, of the Mosers, was being abstracted into one that had little to do with health and instead had a great deal to do with toughness.

Often, with Trump, there is a wincing feeling that he is quoting from old episodes of our collective history. The cocaine crisis of the nineteen-eighties did not really hinge on wily outsiders—it was about a health crisis, too—but those were the most vivid stories, and so they got told and retold. There were tales of the Chambers brothers, who imported teen-agers from the Arkansas delta to staff the crack houses of Detroit; the Jamaican posses of North Miami and the Dominican dealers of Washington Heights; the smugglers who raced product in cigarette boats from the cays of the Bahamas and those who dug holes under the border wall. It did not seem coincidental that Melania Trump opened the event in Manchester by talking about the infants she’d seen in a Cincinnati hospital whose illnesses had been traced to their mothers’ addictions, or that Trump kept insisting that he was personally in favor of “spending a lot of money on great commercials” that would persuade teen-agers not to try drugs. They had in mind crack babies, an egg in a frying pan.

On Monday morning, the Washington Post published an article noting that the Republican dissidents Jeff Flake and John Kasich had recently been spending time in New Hampshire, and suggesting that Trump might face a challenger in the state’s Republican primary in two years. “A lot of voters are getting tired of his act,” the Republican strategist and former state party chair Fergus Cullen told the Post. It turned out, when I called him, that Cullen had grown so disillusioned by his party’s embrace of Trump that he had left politics. For the past two years he has been working as the business manager of a Catholic school near Manchester. Trump’s approval ratings in the state are now around thirty per cent, and though Cullen allowed that most Republicans in the state were still in Trump’s corner, he said that the President’s supporters whom he knew seemed less willing to defend him lately. “The first step of estrangement is holding your tongue,” Cullen said. While we spoke, the President was taking the stage in Manchester, before a handpicked audience of three hundred and fifty people at a community college. It seemed to Cullen that in trying to talk about New Hampshire’s experience with addiction, Trump was talking past it. “The idea that what we need here is capital punishment is not even on the list of how people talk about this,” Cullen said. “It doesn’t connect at all.”

A previous version of this article misspelled the names of Jim and Jeanne Moser.