Cipollone, stammering, tried to explain the procedures for employing National Guard forces.

“You’ve been telling me that shit for weeks. I’m getting killed. Tucker is talking to millions of people. But you and Barr and all of my ‘great lawyers’ aren’t doing a damn thing. Shut it down! Arrest them! Do what you have to do! I have the worst lawyers. Get the radicals locked up! You guys can’t even do that! What is wrong with you? I have to do everything myself.”

It was, so often, a White House of one.

It was him on the phone.

Much of the business of the Trump White House was conducted or influenced through Trump’s lone dialing. He reached out at will and on a whim, often to people he had just seen on television or to random people who inexplicably were able to get through to him.

Now he had Dick Morris on the phone.

Morris was a political operative who was expert at showing up at propitious moments of American negativity, a divisive genius behind the American political curtain.

In 1994, after the disastrous midterm election following Hillary Clinton’s health care overhaul, Morris was called in to help bring the Clinton administration back to its tougher, dunk-on-the-liberals roots. Morris was liked by almost nobody and forever trapped in the amber of a too-good-to-be-untrue sex scandal—nailed sucking on a prostitute’s toes—his very distastefulness somehow allowing him to be the agent of everybody’s harshest political go-to moves.

In some ways, this was quite an unexpectedly conventional move for Trump, to need such a Dr. Darkness.

Morris—“weaseling his way in,” in the frustrated view of the White House staff—had a hook. His father, Eugene Morris, had been, several generations before, a real estate lawyer who represented Trump interests; Trump remembered him fondly: “A real tough son-of-a-bitch.”

Morris now offered Trump an attractive proposition:

COVID and its mounting deaths were being put on the president. And they were trying to lay the death of George Floyd on him, too—just as they’d tried to wrongly pin Charlottesville, the 2017 white supremacist rally that ended in mayhem and violence, on him. But, obviously, said Morris on the phone, it was the protestors who were America’s problem—not COVID!

If someone was trying to blame you, you needed to defiantly blame somebody else, a reliable practice in politics, but one embraced by Trump to a new self-defining extreme. The buck, every Trump aide understood, always stopped somewhere else.

Morris had endless suggestions for the president and articles to print out and read—not that he would read them, but Morris would call and offer a recap of them (not that Trump would necessarily listen to the details of the recap). While never showing up at the White House or visiting the West Wing or campaign headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia—or getting paid, a willingness to work for free being a high recommendation for anybody employed by this president—the seventy-three-year-old Morris suddenly became the president’s whisperer, with even baser political instincts than Trump’s own.