President Donald Trump carried his familiar grievance show to Clarksville, Tennessee, on Saturday, returning to the Volunteer State just one week after being jeered at a college football game in Knoxville. His latest stop used a considerably smaller venue while he loudly challenged reporting that his popularity has fallen.

While traveling to Clarksville, Trump tried to get ahead of that awkward subject with a Truth Social post. He complained that “the Fake News Media are trying to create the false narrative that Donald Trump is so ‘unpopular,’ the Republicans are going to lose.”

Once onstage, Trump delivered a desperate and increasingly stale performance for the assembled MAGA faithful. The routine leaned heavily on his greatest hits, beginning with an attack on coverage of his dismal poll numbers and proceeding through the usual grab bag of boasts, insults, and culture war complaints.

“I’m very popular—I really am,” Trump said. He then claimed that a CNN poll showed him “at 99%, the highest ever in the Republican Party. I’m popular. I’m very popular.”

Trump soon offered a striking description of the loyalty he expects from the people attending his rallies. “It’s amazing when you stand up here,” Trump continued. “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap me—’Oh, I love you so much,’” he said, openly mocking his most reliable supporters.

Then came the uglier business of MAGA politics. Trump launched a racist and deeply offensive attack against Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, repeatedly calling him “Muhammed” and labeling him a “jihadist” rather than addressing him by his actual name.

Trump answered any concern about that conduct with a declaration of presidential entitlement. “I’m the president,” Trump growled. “I can call him whatever the hell I want.”

The rally also featured another round of Trump’s self aggrandizing renaming schemes. The performance appeared designed to draw attention away from his costly and faltering war with Iran and the continuing battle to control the Strait of Hormuz.

“We’re thinking about renaming it to the Trump Strait,” Trump said. He also rambled about how he has renamed the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, then started considering even larger geographic targets for the Trump branding treatment.

“So I was thinking of either the Atlantic or the Pacific. We call it ‘Trump Ocean,’ or ‘Ocean of the Americas,’ or something like that.”

The event kept lurching from one familiar complaint to another. Trump railed against windmills, boasted about his good relationship with China, and then called the Chinese liars, packing still more contradiction and grievance into an appearance already groaning under the weight of recycled material.

Finally, Trump returned to one of the most worn talking points in his political arsenal. “I only talk about it right before elections,” Trump blathered. “How the hell do you win with men in women’s sports and transgender for everybody?”

That admission put the electoral purpose of the line directly into Trump’s own words. His Clarksville appearance moved from anxiety about polling to racist name calling, grandiose renaming proposals, attacks on windmills, boasts about China, and another calculated complaint about transgender people.

The rally arrived after several difficult months for Trump. His approval ratings have plummeted, while a string of humiliating public appearances has forced him, or his handlers, to retreat to smaller venues in increasingly red territory.

Trump’s insistence that he remains popular did little to disguise the desperation surrounding the performance. Even his claim that supporters would applaud the stupidest things highlighted the shrinking bubble in which loyalty matters more than coherence.

If the midterm election results continue along the current trajectory, the pressure on Trump’s fragile ego could intensify. What remains impossible to determine is how far he might go in trying to change that trajectory when boasts, insults, and reheated rally material no longer deliver the adoration he demands.