But nothing moved. Not an uptick in the polls anywhere. Forty million spent for nothing—quite the first time in modern American politics that law and order failed as a hot-button issue.

To say that midsummer was the absolute nadir of the campaign—a failing message, an effective logistical collapse, and an overhaul of the leadership—would not be true, because there were greater nadirs to follow. Immediately.

Bill Stepien, the new campaign manager, shortly discovered a $200 million gap between what the campaign intended to spend and what it would likely take in.

Stepien, also a Kushner choice, was a Brooks Brothers young Republican campaign op type, forty-two but, with a thick hat of boyish hair, looking ten years younger. In Trump’s preferred circle of tall men (though not, preferably, as tall as him), Stepien was short. A New Jersey boy, he had been a key aide to the state’s governor Chris Christie. But in 2014, Christie threw Stepien under the bus when his administration was accused of punishing an unfriendly mayor with massive traffic jams in his town—“Bridgegate.” Stepien was cleared of all responsibility but reduced to menial political jobs until Kushner—always looking to slap down Christie, who, as a federal prosecutor, had put Kushner’s father, a New Jersey real estate developer, in prison—hired him during the 2016 campaign. Quite the opposite of Parscale, Stepien, a veteran of many races, understood that presidential campaigns were as much a function of budgets as they were of rallies and even of a candidate’s magnetism and celebrity appeal.

The Trump campaign had raised more money than any campaign in history, but Parscale had spent more to get it than any campaign prudently would. The campaign would be bone-dry by the first week of October. There would be no money for media, salaries, or even campaign swings on Air Force One.

“Was he stealing from me?” the president now demanded about Parscale in meeting after meeting, confounded by this predicament and adding Parscale’s alleged perfidy to his continual monologue. “Where did all that money go? Was he ripping me off? I knew he was ripping me off even in 2016!”

Part of the answer was that the money had gone to raise even more money in order to inflate the numbers that kept the president happy. Trump held in his head a running tally supplied to him on a constant basis by Parscale, and lifted by flights of exaggeration of his own, of every cent the campaign had raised. Yes, the Trump campaign could brag about more online donors than any campaign in history, by a factor of ten to one, but the costs of online fundraising, while it might seem inexpensive with free email, was in fact 35 to 40 percent more than traditional in-person events. Customer acquisition costs—list acquisition, social media ad buys, the build-out of a digital marketing arm—bedeviled every online direct-to-consumer business, which is what the Trump campaign had turned itself into. Whereas, with the old ways, the only costs for in-person events at which you might raise $10 million or $20 million were an hors d’oeuvre platter and some cheap white wine and the use of a rich supporter’s house.