As the meeting got hotter, Trump added more people to it. He got Meadows by phone, and then Giuliani (clearly in a restaurant somewhere, amid the din of conversation and clinking ice), and then, failing to find Clark, he had the White House track down Morgan. Each of the new participants was patched through to a voluble Oval Office full of people. It was hard to figure out who, in the crosstalk. The president seemed to be the instigator in chief, a kind of Jerry Springer, polling people in the room to express themselves and egging them on to take pot shots at one another. At the center of this was a genuine discussion about having the military seize voting machines, with the president entertaining this in some blank-canvas, we-can-do-anything-can’t-we? sense. The president seemed entertained, continuing to poll the room and the people on the phone.

“Do we know that we can do this? I think we can. Don’t you?” he pressed.

Meadows kept trying to change the subject.

Herschmann, trying to be lawyerly, kept pointing out the discrepancies between what Powell was saying and Giuliani’s position.

An excited Giuliani wanted to know if he should run over from the Georgetown restaurant where he was having drinks and dinner.

“The more bizarre shit becomes, the more Trump likes it,” one West Wing aide analyzed. It was only everyone else who, panicked, seemed to believe they were on the verge of either declaring martial law or holding back the forces of the political apocalypse. Trump himself seemed happy in the moment.

It was impossible to know who was ahead in this argument, or even if, in any sense, the argument was real.

When Giuliani got there, Powell was yelling at the group that she had five affidavits, waving them in the air, which would conclusively prove her claims that the Dominion voting machines were a tool of a wide conspiracy. Giuliani grabbed the affidavits from her and quickly surmised that all five were from the same source. Code-named “Spyder,” Powell was billing her source as a “military intelligence expert,” but, in reality, he was an IT consultant in Dallas named Joshua Merritt who had failed to complete his entry-level training course in military intelligence, and that was fifteen years ago.

“This is gibberish, nonsense,” said Giuliani, prompting someone else in the room to note how far out there you had to be to lose Rudy.

By the end of the meeting, some in the room were convinced that Trump was going to give Powell a White House position, as special counsel overseeing an election investigation, or even thinking they would wake up to find that she had replaced Cipollone.