Watching at the White House, the President seemed to read the results as a victory that was all about him and his divisive approach to politics. Establishment Republicans had seen the President steamroll their professional politicians in 2016 with a message that emphasized banning Muslims and walling out immigrants rather than the traditional party platform of lower taxes and less regulation. The 2018 primaries, in which Republicans who broke with Trump lost to those who embraced him, made it clear the party and Trump are now effectively one.

Even if some Republicans had qualms about this, the party had little choice, given the way the President enthralled the base and dominated the news cycle. At an August meeting in the White House Map Room, two of Trump’s top political advisers, Bill Stepien and Johnny DeStefano, presented him with a midterm plan–a proposed itinerary of political travel, fundraisers and rallies that would outpace the midterm campaign schedules of recent predecessors. They considered it an aggressive plan. But Trump wasn’t satisfied. “There’s not enough,” he said. In the final six days of the campaign, he made 11 stops to activate the GOP base.

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan urged him to focus on congressional accomplishments and the booming economy at his multiple campaign rallies. But the message was entirely overshadowed by darker ones. To confront a caravan of legal asylum seekers thousands of miles away, Trump sent more troops to the southern border than the U.S. has deployed to fight ISIS. He promised a undeliverable tax cut. He mocked the woman who’d accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, and blamed the media for an attempted assassination of top Democrats by a pipe bomber, who was in fact a professed Trump acolyte. Rather than salve the nation’s wounds after 11 Jews were gunned down in their Pittsburgh synagogue, he complained that the attack had stalled his political momentum. He tweeted about polls that didn’t exist and warned that police would be on the lookout for voter fraud. “Pretend I’m on the ballot,” he told voters at a rally in Southaven, Miss., in early October.