Now, in fact, the president was worried that the press was going to leave the impression that Giuliani had gotten the virus from him. “They blame me for everybody getting it,” he pronounced, looking for sympathy.

Then Jenna Ellis got it two days later (the West Wing joke being that she got it from a Giuliani fart).

Being out of the president’s sight was never a good thing, not least of all because other people started to talk in your stead, often about you, and to call attention to your bad press or, in fact, to any press you were getting that might be at the president’s expense. And now the press kept pointing out, and people kept pointing this press out to him, that, as Trump interpreted it, Jenna had never argued so much as a parking ticket.

By the time Ellis returned from her recovery, she was a much-reduced presence in the White House. “She was giving me the yips,” said the president, meaning a combination of she was standing too close to him and she was too obviously profiting off his favor.

The Senate election in Georgia was left, much more realistically than Trump’s own, hanging out there.

Georgia had become another particularly unsettled and gnawing issue in the president’s mind. The fact that a historically deep-red state had gotten this close to breaking from the southern bloc and from him was another sign that pernicious and unseen forces were at work. Meadows, whose Freedom Caucus was made up largely of House members from the southern states and whose own future was tied to a certain southern hegemony, had taken over the Georgia fight, pushing Rudy, a far-from-southern conservative, out.

This was another part of the Rudy tension. While Trump needed him, other conservatives distrusted him. He might be all in for Trump, but he was yet a pro-choice, big-city, much-divorced northerner (as was Trump himself, in the not-so-far past).

Then, too, Meadows understood that it was of far more value helping to save a single Senate seat in Georgia, and therefore the Republican majority in the Senate, than spending all your capital trying to upend the results of the presidential election there, an obviously futile enterprise.