Ninety-three thousand people tried to get tickets for President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again rally on Saturday night in Richmond, Kentucky, but only about 10,000 seats were available, according to the chief executive.

“There’s something going on — it reminds me of ’16,” Trump told reporters just before leaving the White House on Saturday afternoon for the trip to Kentucky.

He was headed for yet another packed-house campaign rally in his bid to defy the conventional wisdom in another election.

At the rally, which was filled with an overflow crowd as he predicted, Trump talked about his meeting earlier that day in the Oval Office with pastor Andrew Brunson, released Friday more than two years after being arrested and jailed by Turkish authorities, who claimed he was involved with a domestic political movement behind an unsuccessful coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“Just hours ago, we celebrated another tremendous victory for the American people. You know what I’m talking about. We’re having a lot of victories, folks, can you handle it? In the Oval Office of the White House, I welcomed home pastor Andrew Brunson, great man, from Turkey,” Trump told the crowd in his opening remarks.

“He is now free from jail … He’s back with his family, together with his wife, and he is on American soil … It wasn’t easy, wasn’t easy, that one wasn’t easy. And we don’t pay ransom,” he said.

Related: Trump Predicts Many African-Americans Will Vote Republican in November

The balance of Trump’s oration stuck to the campaign themes he has been driving home repeatedly. He boasted that “America is booming, America is thriving again … We have created 4.2 million new jobs.”

And with the boasts about Republican successes came the blasts at Democrats.

“What the radical Democrats did to Justice Kavanaugh, it was a national disgrace … It was a shameful campaign of personal destruction. They were on a mission to delay, demolish, obstruct and destroy. They have become totally consumed by their lust for power,” Trump said.

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Trump pointed to the November 6 midterm election as representing a clear choice: “You can vote for the Democrats’ mob rule, or you can vote for the Republican Party of law, liberty and justice — it’s as simple as that.”

Trump repeated his allegation that “the Democrats have become the party of crime, they really have,” and “the Republicans are the party of safety and the party of jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made a brief appearance, praising Trump. He noted that that the Republican-led Senate has confirmed 84 new federal judges, including two Supreme Court justices, and he encouraged the chief executive to keep sending new nominees to the Senate for confirmation.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also appeared briefly. He thanked the president for supporting his idea to allow individuals to join health care insurance groups and associations as a means of lowering premiums and extending coverage.

Related: Pastor Brunson Freed: Another ‘Promise Made, Promise Kept’ from the Trump Administration

Trump told the crowd that he mainly came to boost the re-election campaign of Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), who thanked the chief executive “for ending the war on coal.” Barr is in an unexpectedly close race against Democratic challenger Amy McGrath that RealClearPolitics.com has rated as a toss-up.

“This president is a man of action. Other people resist, but this president gets results,” Barr said.

Trump touted a vote for Barr as “a vote for safe communities, strong borders and Kentucky values.” A vote for McGrath, Trump said, is “a vote for an extreme liberal chosen by Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and the radical Democrat mob.”

He added, “Now Amy supports a socialist takeover of your health care, which, by the way, means your taxes are going to triple, if you’re lucky. She supports open borders, she needs the tax hikes to cover the through-the-roof garbage that you want no part of, and she wants to immediately decimate your now-thriving coal industry.”

“The election of Andy is a really important thing … It could be the most important race there is, so get out and vote, we can’t let that happen.”

Barr’s tight race in a district that normally leans Republican apparently has White House political strategists worried; Trump said, “The election of Andy is a really important thing … It could be the most important race there is, so get out and vote. We can’t let that happen.”

In the foreign-policy area, Trump told the crowd that soon after he was elected, he received a briefing on Iran and the Middle East. “It was just a matter of time before they took over the entire Middle East. They’re not thinking about that anymore, folks, they’re not thinking about it.”

He added: “They got a little disaster going with riots in the streets, their currency is shot, and they will be coming to us someday, probably not too far out, and they will say, ‘We’d like to make a deal.’ And that’s fine, that’s good. But a real deal, not the joke of a deal that was made by the past administration.”