Trump is giving advice on how to win the primaries.

“Mini Mike—how’d he do in the debate the other day?” President Donald Trump asked, at a rally in Las Vegas on Friday. He was talking about Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, for whom he had some advice. But first he wanted to remind the crowd of Bloomberg’s height. “Here’s a box, Mike!” Trump said. (Bloomberg did not, in fact, stand on a box for the Democratic debate in Nevada.) The crowd cheered on his derision. “He was a beauty—what happened?” Trump clutched his throat and lolled his tongue in a somewhat graphic mime of choking. Then he arrived at what he saw as Bloomberg’s central problem: “Pocahontas screaming at him.” He meant Senator Elizabeth Warren, and he knew just how Bloomberg should respond to her.

By calling her “Pocahontas,” of course.

“Why didn’t he bring that up when she was screaming at him?” Bloomberg didn’t call Warren “Pocahontas”; that was why “she won that debate.” The lapse was incomprehensible to Trump, who segued into a stream of reminiscences about how he had won his primary debates during the 2016 campaign. “That’s what they all said! I won,” he boasted.

He won by being more vulgar and belligerent and trashy than anyone else. So everyone else should out-trashy him? I guess.

No, wait a second – he won the Republican primaries. He’s telling Bloomberg what to do to Be Like Him but Bloomberg is running as a Democrat. I don’t think Democrats as a group are as wedded to trashy racist sexist insults as an election technique as the Republicans are. In fact many Republicans have switched to being Democrats because they can’t stand the trash-talk.

At a rally in Colorado, a day before his event in Nevada, he brandished printouts of old press reports touting his debating prowess. “I became President because of the debates, because unlike Mini Mike I could answer questions,” Trump said—a line that might seem delusional if one thinks that, in order to “answer questions,” a person actually needs to give answers, rather than just attack the questioner. And yet Trump has something of a point; even if he didn’t “win” all the Republican debates, he did, on the whole, dominate them, at least in terms of shaping the tone. And that domination prefigured his takeover of the G.O.P. and the Party’s abasement of itself before him. Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Low-Energy Jeb. The President seems amazed that the Democrats aren’t all calling one another names. That’s what he would do.

Lots of Republicans like it, lots of Democrats not so much.