“Has Brad actually ever done anything right?” The fuming president addressed the room as though Parscale weren’t there. “He’s fucked up everything.” The president, looming over the now-photo-ready clean surface of his desk, only the red button for summoning his Diet Cokes visible, exploded: “How can you be so stupid? Answer me!” he demanded of Parscale in front of the group.

Parscale tried to stutter out a defense but then just shut up and took it.

“I’m asking you how you can be so stupid? I can’t believe I have such a stupid campaign manager,” Trump stormed on at Parscale. “You’ve fucked up everything!”

Everybody in the room had seen this story before. In a way, it was a Trump set piece, a venting that seemed not to exhaust him but to create more fuel as it went on. Everybody endured their own mortification, appreciating the lesson—for most everyone, not their first lesson—that the president always needed someone else to blame; that nothing bad happened to him that was not directly caused by the failure or active malice of someone else.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid … just tell me how stupid you can possibly be? I want to know. Really. Tell me.” He continued whipping his campaign manager.

The next day, Trump and Kushner demoted Parscale, and turned the operation over to Parscale’s deputy, Bill Stepien. They would have to restart the campaign.

George Floyd was killing him. A week after Floyd’s murder caused by a Minneapolis policeman kneeling on his neck, setting off mass protests across the country, the president, in order to show his strength, had walked across Lafayette Park to St. John’s Church with his generals—the park cleared of protestors by tear-gas and other riot-control measures—and he’d been killed for that. He looked weak. And it wasn’t just the lamestream media on him—Tucker Carlson on Fox was calling him weak and ineffective. What’s more, he was being screwed by his own Justice Department and attorney general, paralyzed, afraid to move, Bill Barr, such a suck-up, but as worthless, it turned out, as Jeff Sessions, the man he’d replaced for being worthless.

Now Trump had had enough. He needed legal action and media pushback.

“I’m getting killed on Tucker and we’re not doing a damn thing,” he sat in the Oval Office and screamed at Mark Meadows, the former North Carolina congressman, only a few months into his job as Trump’s fourth chief of staff, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, one of Trump’s favorite White House targets for mockery and abuse.

Protestors in Portland and Seattle were taking over everything. They were toppling statues and nobody was doing anything—making him look … weak! Looking weak was as bad as you could look.

Cipollone said they had things in motion.

“I don’t give a shit what you have in motion, I want them in jail. They should get ten years in prison for toppling a statue. And that Mayor Wheeler…”—the mayor of Portland—“what a loser. Can’t we just send in the Guard?”