Still: What was he thinking? Here they were, a month in, with every single indicator having gone against them: More than fifty separate lawsuits had collapsed by early December. Anything that the election challenge needed in order to proceed had failed. The countdown to final disposition was in days—by December 8, each state would certify its election results, and on December 14, electors would meet in each state capital. They were, in terms of reason and logic and practicality, at the end of the internet. So: What was he really thinking? He must understand. Yes?

There was hardly any indication that he did. Trumpworld had two levels, those within the sound of his voice, a level he wholly dominated, and events and people beyond it, a level he was often not very interested in, cognizant of, or realistic about. In the first level, he had, incontrovertibly, won the election by a landslide and it had been taken from him by both blatant and unseen hands: thieves in the night and the liberal establishment. And he, by his own act of will, would get it back by demanding that it be given back! His voice defined the day and the mission.

Okay, but, possibly, he had a finer sense of the larger play, beyond what others could see. That had always been part of the surmise of a higher explanation, that he was playing three-dimensional chess. But this suggestion sat awkwardly, to say the least, with his constant binary logic: he liked something, or he didn’t like something; someone liked him or didn’t like him; it was good for him, or it was bad for him; he knew what he knew and had no idea or interest in what he didn’t know. But perhaps the answer was beyond logic. His emotional intelligence was all about performance. He was a circus barker, the ultimate promoter personality, mass rather than class, with a genius sense of how to satisfy the audience. He was an actor playing Donald Trump the character, doing what he thought that character would do, what would most appeal to the character’s audience—what would get ratings.

You could dismiss everything else about him, but you still had to respect that.

Here was a fact: his campaign had raised more than $200 million since its defeat. Us against them? Fighting spirit in the face of overwhelming odds against you? Or total reality inversion, the Pied Piper leading the deadhead Trump children into the alternative universe?

Something was working, if beyond all sense and logic.

On December 3, Trump convened a meeting in the Oval Office to talk about the money. What would the richest defeated campaign in the history of political failure do with all its money? What could it do? And where was the money? Where would it go if—perish the thought—the defeated president was forced to leave the White House?