CINCINNATI — After imbibing days of wall-to-wall news coverage of the 2020 Democratic debates, President Trump seemed to feel a little left out. “The Democrats spent more time attacking Barack Obama than they did attacking me, practically,” he marveled.

And so the neglected president flew to Ohio on Thursday night to try to wrest back attention to his own re-election effort as he took the stage at a typically boisterous campaign rally and painted prominent Democrats as “left-wing extremists” who would bring socialism to the United States if any of them beat him next year.

“Democrats have never been farther outside the mainstream,” he told an arena packed with supporters. “No matter what label they use,” he added, “a vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of our great, our beautiful, our wonderful American dream. We’re not going to let our country ever go down the route of socialism.”

Delivering a reliably red-meat, 80-minute speech, Mr. Trump singled out former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and he seized on some of the more liberal proposals advanced by Democrats, including eliminating private health insurance in favor of a government-run system and providing health care coverage even to illegal immigrants.

“Democrats care more about illegal aliens than they care about their own constituents,” he said. “They put foreign citizens before American citizens. We’re not going to do that.”

But even as he roused the crowd, he avoided repeating some of the more inflammatory language he has used lately, including his demand that four Democratic congresswomen of color “go back” to their home countries.

In his first rally after a North Carolina crowd chanted “Send her back,” drawing condemnations even from fellow Republicans, Mr. Trump made no explicit mention of Representative Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born Minnesota Democrat, nor did the crowd repeat the chant.

Mr. Trump had sent mixed signals in the hours before the rally about whether his supporters should. Asked by reporters before leaving the White House if he would stop them, he said: “I don’t know that you can stop people. I don’t know that you can. I mean, we’ll see what we can do. I’d prefer that they don’t, but if they do it, we’ll have to make a decision then.”

The crowd did turn to some Trump rally classics, including “Lock her up” (for “Crooked Hillary” Clinton, as he again called her) as well as “U-S-A, U-S-A” and “Trump! Trump!”

But if the president skirted by Ms. Omar, he focused his lines of attack on American inner cities — including Baltimore, which he has disparaged in recent days as a “rat and rodent infested mess” — and linked urban crime with the ineptitude of Democratic lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker.

“No one has paid a higher price than Americans living in our inner cities,” Mr. Trump told supporters. Accusing the country’s largest and most diverse cities of being under single-party control, he added: “The conditions of Nancy Pelosi’s once great city of San Francisco are deplorable. Do you remember the word deplorable?”

His nearly all-white crowd on Thursday did little to help make the case that African-Americans have welcomed his inflammatory language, as he has claimed. But a small group of African-American supporters drew enthusiastic cheers when they stood and held up signs and T-shirts with messages like “Trump & Republicans Are Not Racist” and “Blacks for Trump.”

Reviving some of his favorite arsenal of insults and anecdotes, Mr. Trump seemed intent on recapturing the firebrand appeal of his campaign to voters in swing states. Ohio was selected for the event because his re-election effort considers the state, along with other Midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin, as critical to winning a second term.

A Quinnipiac University poll last month showed former Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump in Ohio, 50 percent to 42 percent, although the president was effectively tied with other Democratic candidates who were tested. Either way, Mr. Trump has insisted that such surveys are no more trustworthy than the predictions that he would lose in a landslide in 2016.

He went after Mr. Biden by name — or rather by nickname, saying that “Sleepy Joe Biden” has “no clue what the hell he’s doing.” The only other candidate he directly attacked was Ms. Warren as he returned to his criticism of her for claiming she had Native American blood. “She defrauded people with her credentials,” he said.

Mr. Trump was interrupted by protesters twice during the rally, stopping at one juncture to watch as a group holding a sign that read “Immigrants Built America” was ejected from the arena.

“You must have a Democrat mayor?” Mr. Trump asked, leaning toward the edge of the stage to survey crowdgoers as he waited for the protesters to clear out. “Do you have a Democrat mayor?” (Cincinnati’s mayor, John Cranley, is a Democrat.)

Still, Mr. Trump’s fans expressed unbridled enthusiasm for him despite — or perhaps because of — the various altercations he provokes in Washington. They came wearing the traditional red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps and waved preprinted signs like “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” and “Women for Trump.”

Even Vice President Mike Pence, whom Mr. Trump has praised as one of the “nicest human beings,” tried his hand at ribbing the Democrats before the president took the stage: “Those people were standing so far to the left I thought that stage was going to flip over.”

The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., warmed up the crowd by attacking the family’s favorite targets, including the former special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, mocking his halting answers before Congress last week.

The younger Mr. Trump said Democratic candidates embarrassed themselves during their debates this week, making it easier for his father to secure a second term in next year’s election.

“Thank you for your in-kind contribution to re-electing my father in 2020,” he said.

He mocked Mr. Biden’s performance. “He can’t get through an answer in the debate without looking at his notes, without stammering through it,” the president’s son said. “He didn’t know the difference between a text message and an email.”

During a speech that was meandering at times — “I don’t use the teleprompter very much,” the president said — Mr. Trump made sure to thank his son for his rally performance and revisit that hit list, yet again calling Mr. Biden “Sleepy Joe” and sarcastically saying Mr. Mueller appeared “sharp as a tack” during his testimony.

As he closed in on the hour mark, the president veered away from his usual campaign messaging and toward more trivial matters, such as his ability to correctly pronounce the city of Lima, Ohio.

It was a trick he learned during his winning campaign bid in 2016, he said, seeming almost wistful for a time before he was president.

“I had such a great life,” Mr. Trump said. “It was so easy.”

Peter Baker reported from Cincinnati, and Katie Rogers from Washington.

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