But none of this yet explained why Navarro, the trade expert, became the White House’s go-to expert on election fraud. Similarly, he had once taken it upon himself to research and identify “Anonymous,” the administration figure who had written contemptuously and covertly about the White House in the New York Times—which he got wrong.

On December 17, Navarro issued—in what he described as his capacity as a private citizen, but what White House aides observed was researched and written on White House time—the first of his reports on the stolen election, Volume One: The Immaculate Deception. (This would be followed by Volume Two: The Art of the Steal and Volume Three: Yes, President Trump Won.) The reports made the case against “the authoritarian—nay fascist—behavior of a small group of social media oligarchs,” the larger Democratic Party, and all other elements of the Republican Party skeptical of the claims of election fraud. Even the Washington Examiner, the conservative DC paper almost invariably friendly to the president, could only take mocking and derisive notice of Navarro’s claims and numbers.

The “Navarro Report” promptly became the standard Trump and Giuliani bible in their version of the 2020 election.

The ongoing struggle from the Oval Office to reverse the election results was on a parallel track with the struggle of much of the rest of the West Wing against those same people empowered by the president to attack the election.

On December 18, a meeting was held in the Oval Office that was not all that dissimilar from the constant chaotic and disorganized meetings in the Oval, but in counterpropaganda fashion, it would become memorialized in the election-challenge saga.

What happened in the Oval Office that day (or on any other day) was not so much an indication of a strategy or even part of the process of formulating a plan, but instead, consisted of the random comings and goings of random people. Protocols, priorities, chain of command—all were largely absent. There was no functioning calendar, no real process for vetting people. Seldom, if ever, was there a strict agenda. At any given time, people in the West Wing with visitor passes might easily wander into the Oval Office, which itself would almost invariably be populated by an ever-revolving group of West Wing kibitzers, gossipers, backstabbers, and those eager or willing to hang on the president’s every word. It was not unusual to find the youngest West Wing staffers in with the president, listening to his catalogue of complaints and resentments and media critiques.

Perhaps above all else, the operative principle of the Trump government was that the president could not be alone—the more crowded the Oval Office, the less alone he felt. This might not have allowed more people to have an influence on Donald Trump—he was not so much listening to people as having them listen to him—but it certainly allowed more people to think they had an influence.