Anyone hoping that the departure of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon would signal a course correction — a pivot away from the Trump administration’s short (but prolific) history of ethno-nationalist pandering — must have been dismayed by the president’s performance last Tuesday night in Phoenix.

For seventy-six excruciating minutes, in sweltering one-hundred-degree heat that dropped police officers, protesters, and #MAGA loyalists alike, Trump expelled more hot air of his own: pitch-perfect racist dog whistles, bemoaning the fate of Confederate monuments (“They are trying to take away our history and our heritage!”); meandering diatribes about the American lügenpresse (“If you want to discover the source of the division in our country, look no further than the fake news and the crooked media, which would rather get ratings and clicks than tell the truth. I mean, the New York Times has written some stories.”); a teaser campaign for his presidential pardon of Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who faces six whole months of potential jail time for failing to obey a 2011 court order against racial profiling (“I’ll make a prediction. I think he’s going to be just fine, Okay? But — but I won’t do it tonight, because I don’t want to cause any controversy.”); plus the usual obsessional monologue over his crowd sizes; some petulant grudge litigation; the standard Two Minutes Hate for Hillary; and a little jingoism to warm up. It was all there.

Trump said these things not because he is his “own strategist” — as he put it to the New York Post during Bannon’s precarious near-exit last April — but because Bannon’s work here is done. The circle is now complete.