Donald Trump turned his back to the crowd and stared up at the screen. Ominous music rang out. For the next minute and a half, the former president and his audience in Atlanta stood and silently watched clips of news reports of immigrants in the country without legal permission committing horrific crimes.

When the montage ended, Trump said out loud what he has been telling his advisers in private for weeks: that, in his view, immigration is the “No. 1” issue in the 2024 election.

“That beats out the economy. That beats it all out to me; it’s not even close,” Trump said of the immigration issue, after playing the video Tuesday night. “The United States is now an occupied country. But on Nov. 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.”

In the final weeks of a campaign that the former president has been waging more or less since his first year out of office, Trump is going with his gut, doubling down on the rhetoric that he believes won him the 2016 election and using immigration and the border to form the core of his closing message to voters.

Those instincts are at odds with the data and with some of his advisers.

Trump has told aides that he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 with the border but that in 2020, the border was “fixed” — illegal crossings had dropped to a dramatic low in part because of the coronavirus pandemic — so he could not use it as an issue against Joe Biden. He thinks immigration is more potent than ever as a political message, after the record levels of border crossings under the Biden-Harris administration and after he helped kill a bipartisan border security bill that the administration tried to pass.

But neither public nor private surveys support Trump’s theory of the race. Voters frequently rank the economy and the high cost of living as their most important issue.

Trump has spent considerable time and energy in recent days at economy-themed events, pitching proposals to make car loan interest fully tax deductible and to offer companies tax breaks and other benefits if they move their manufacturing to the United States or keep it there.

But Trump draws his energy from his rallies, and it is the reaction on immigration he is getting there that is helping convince him that the issue is better for him than the economy.

When he launches into an immigration tirade, Trump gets animated, florid, dark and tribal. And there is a difference in how the audience and the news media responds, compared with the response he gets when he talks about grocery prices, taxes or tariffs. It gets more attention, and it always has.

Trump has told allies that he thinks crowds get “bored” when he talks too much about the economy, according to a person close to him.

And Trump has a new reason for focusing on the issue: He has told rally audiences and people close to him that his opposition to illegal immigration saved his life.

In Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, Trump turned his head to look at a chart of illegal border crossings on a screen at the very moment a would-be assassin’s bullet missed his skull by less than an inch and grazed his ear. He has given the chart, and the issue it illustrated, an almost mythical status. “If you think about it, illegal immigration saved my life; I’m the only one,” Trump told a crowd in Aurora, Colorado. “Usually, it’s the opposite.”

Some in Trump’s orbit, like his influential adviser Stephen Miller, fully support his instinct to emphasize immigration as the top issue for voters. Other allies worry that some of his more extreme immigration rhetoric — like his baseless claim that Haitian migrants are eating cats and dogs — risks turning off moderate voters whose support he needs.

Trump has been pushing advisers to get more immigration content, and they are obliging. Miller — the hardest of immigration hard-liners — has been flying more often on Trump’s plane since the summer and playing a big role in shaping his closing message. Miller declined to comment for this article.

Last month, Trump was intent on visiting Springfield, Ohio, after spreading unfounded rumors that Haitian migrants there were eating the pets of the city’s residents. He declared publicly that he would soon travel to Springfield.

Ohio is not considered a battleground state, but Trump thought it would be politically powerful to show up to highlight the perils of undocumented immigration. (The immigrants in question were in the country legally, including many who qualified for Temporary Protected Status after fleeing violence and chaos in Haiti.) But after bomb threats closed Springfield schools and threats against Haitians spiked, local Republican officials pleaded with Trump to stay away.