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Even for a man, and a movement, defined by bizarre spectacles, President Trump’s “midterm convention” in Dallas this week was a bizarre spectacle.

I say President Trump’s midterm convention because it wasn’t really about the Republican Party. Yes, the president made his appeal to attendees and viewers to think of him when they cast a ballot for the Republican candidate in their state or district. “Please pretend that I’m running and get out and vote on Nov. 3 or sooner, because in actuality I really am running,” he said during his keynote address on Wednesday night.

But much of the programming was less about the party than it was about the man at its helm. And to say that it was a lovefest is to understate the extent of the worship. Speakers praised Trump as something like a savior.

Trump, declared the chairman of the Republican National Committee, is “the greatest Republican messenger of our lifetime, the leader of America’s comeback” and “the best president this country has ever had.” Or, as one video put it, “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

The basic story told at the convention was a familiar one. The United States was on the verge of total collapse before Trump took over. Under him, there has been a glorious revitalization of the nation’s fortunes — a golden age of wealth and prosperity for all. Democrats threaten this paradise, and the only way to protect the success of the past two years is to send Republicans back to Congress with their majorities intact.

As usual, this isn’t a collaborative story. It is not that Trump and the Republican Party have worked together to produce a golden age; it’s that Trump, in his infinite glory, has bestowed prosperity on the American people. Rejecting Republicans is rejecting him, and rejecting him is akin to blasphemy, a demonstration not just of a lack of resolve, but of a lack of faith.

The single strangest moment in all of this was when Trump led the audience in a pledge to himself, which included a promise to cheat if necessary.

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on Nov. 3, or we are going to vote before that.

I don’t think anything like this has ever happened in mainstream American politics. It is as if the Republican Party has simply given in to the fact that it is little more than a cult of personality centered on an aging celebrity real estate developer.

Now, the central gamble of all this is to energize Trump voters to turn out in the midterms. Specifically, the low-frequency and less-attached voters who have only come out to support the president when he is on the ballot, and who otherwise abstain from elections. The thinking is that if these people can come to the polls, then Republicans might be able to overcome their deep deficit.

The deficit is indeed deep. Trump’s approval rating has sunk, in the most reputable polls, down to the low 30s. The generic ballot — which measures the relative position of each party in the upcoming elections — shows Democrats with about a seven-point advantage. Democratic Senate candidates aren’t ahead only in swing states like North Carolina and Michigan; they are also either ahead or neck-and-neck in Republican-leaning states such as Texas, Alaska, Ohio and Iowa.

There is a real chance that Republicans will suffer a decisive defeat in the Senate and a potentially catastrophic one in the House. Anything that can be done to minimize the damage makes sense, from the Republican point of view. The question, then, is: Does this midterm convention make sense?

If the goal was to show the public that the Republican Party, as Vice President JD Vance argued in his keynote, was the party of normalcy, then the cultlike atmosphere of the proceedings made that difficult. If the goal is simply to energize the low-propensity Trump voter, then it is also a crapshoot, given the low likelihood that this type of person was even aware of the convention, much less watching it.

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Damon Winter/The New York Times

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