On Friday night, President Trump turned up in Mobile, Ala., to give a campaign rally five weeks ahead of the midterm elections.
"I'm really here because, sometimes," he said, "you've got to pay respect to the people that loved you right from the beginning."
The indoor arena at the University of South Alabama purred. As Republican prospects for November have darkened, Mr. Trump has started to really throw himself into the campaign trail. So far, that trail has led him to some interesting destinations. A Republican president, campaigning in ruby-red Alabama? Texas? Oklahoma? What's next, Nebraska? Yes, actually, that is where he will be on Monday.
Mobile occupies a mythic place in Trump lore, though. This is, in some sense, the birthplace of the MAGA rally, that traveling roadshow of Mr. Trump's that would come to define the next decade of national political life in America.
"I don't know if you know. It sort of all began here," Mr. Trump reminded his audience as soon as he took the stage Friday. When he came here in August 2015, his rise had only just begun. It was shortly after the first Republican primary debate. He was still duking it out against Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, and still being treated by much of the news media as little more than a tulip craze. Mr. Trump's campaign apparatus at the time was small and scrappy and run out of his tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. His campaign made the potentially embarrassing move of staging his event in Mobile at a massive, open-air football stadium. They were vindicated when some 30,000 people showed up, much to the shock of the establishment and the candidate himself.
"It was a big friggin' deal," recalled Michael Glassner, a political operative who was there working for Mr. Trump that day.
"I've either been on presidential campaigns, or been around them, since 1988, and there never really had been something on that scale for a primary candidate, in modern American politics, to my knowledge," Mr. Glassner said. It was the moment he realized that the Trump phenomenon "was going to break all of the rules" of politics, he added.
One aide who traveled with Mr. Trump to Mobile that day was Corey Lewandowski. "I was in his vehicle," Mr. Lewandowski recalled. "We passed a number of homes that were in communities that weren't affluent at all, and there were people outside sitting in their chairs, holding handmade signs, waving, supporting. It was very, very humbling."
The significance of that moment, he said, was that "at a venue in the Deep South, with a candidate who many chastised or criticized for being married three times, and said didn't quote unquote uphold traditional Republican values, that clearly was not on the minds of the people of Alabama. They turned out in record numbers." This was a sign of much to come. The president relived those glorious days from the stage Friday night.
"We packed the stadium and the rest was history," he said, "right here in Mobile."
But that was then. These days, Mr. Trump is in political trouble, even with members of his famously loyal base. The indoor arena that he spoke at on Friday was a fraction of the size of the football stadium he once spoke in — security concerns are such that he rarely speaks in outdoor venues anymore — and still the place was not full. Some upper sections were almost completely empty. Mr. Trump's poll numbers have been falling for months. On Friday, The New York Times reported that he personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency. A day before the rally in Mobile, this reporter took a circuitous drive along the Gulf Coast and detected signs along the way that Donald Trump's decade-long love affair with the Deep South may be wilting.
"I'm very disheartened right now," a 76-year-old, three-time Trump-voting woman named Kris Rouse sai...
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