And in a Trump world of constant freelancing, and in an atmosphere of surprise revenue streams and general cheerfulness and congratulations about personal gain, it was even harder to know where the money was going, whether it should or shouldn’t be going there and even if you should be asking that question.

Katie Walsh—a longtime RNC advisor and consultant, a Parscale ally, and briefly the deputy chief of staff in the Trump White House before she fell out with Kushner—had been installed as the interface between the campaign and the RNC. After Parscale’s departure, she was confronted by campaign aides who demanded to know why she was drawing fifteen thousand dollars a month from Parscale-controlled companies that were billing the fees back to the campaign. “Am I?” she responded, a disingenuousness that was also a reflection of the labyrinthine difficulties of knowing who in Trumpworld was paying whom and for what.

Months after the campaign, there would be continuing questions about how much money had flowed from the campaign through outside companies controlled by Parscale, with estimates going as high as $30 or $40 million. Gary Coby, who ran online fundraising, was sending close to five million text messages a day to potential donors. The cost of a text message at this volume should have been one or two cents apiece, but the Trump campaign was spending more than seven cents a message, much of that going through Coby’s outside company.

“Whatever Gary is making is worth it,” said Kushner, cutting off any questions. “He’s the one bringing in all the money.” In Kushner’s platitude-friendly management style, if you had the big stuff—that is the money (and in the Trump political world, like the Trump business world, you focused on the bragging rights of gross rather than the harsher reality of net)—the little stuff would follow.

As for Trump, the consternation, rumors, and blame over misspent and misdirected (if not misappropriated) funds within the White House and the campaign organization all had one thing in common: agreement that the president had no idea where the money was going. He was “blissfully unaware,” in one campaign official’s description.

On July 20, the pollsters came into the Oval Office—John McLaughlin and Tony Fabrizio.

McLaughlin reliably tried to make his poll numbers say what Trump wanted them to say. Fabrizio didn’t give a shit and, indeed, made little effort to hide his disgust for the president. Fabrizio was sixty years old, overweight, and—quite an anomaly in the Republican circles in which he made his living—had been out of the closet for several years. He was snarly and gruff and more and more seemed to enjoy being a Debbie Downer, just telling you what the data showed.

Trump, for his part, thought Fabrizio charged too much and leaked to the New York Times. The president seemed personally repelled by him, settling on him the obvious sobriquet “Fat Tony.”