Back in March, in the first days of the lockdown, nearly thirty people had gathered, maskless, in the Oval Office, the president behind the desk, a lineup of chairs in front of him, the couches filled, people behind the couches in the back, more at the sides—people from the White House, from the campaign, from the RNC, and from the Trump family. The subject was the Democrats’ efforts to steal the election.

Steal was rather a term of art, meaning not really stealing the election, but lobbying state and local authorities to liberalize election rules to make it easier for people to vote who were less inclined to vote—that is, getting more Democrats to vote.

“Steal” in the president’s mind extended beyond voting. The “Russia hoax” and the two years of the Mueller investigation were attempts to steal his presidency. He repeatedly returned to his claim that he deserved two extra years, bonus years, because of “the steal.”

The Democrats, under the guise of COVID, were out to “rig” the election, albeit (it was sometimes added) “legally.”

In this, they had a “genius,” or a “Dr. Evil”: Marc Elias. An election lawyer, Elias had served as the top lawyer for both the Bill Clinton and John Kerry campaigns and—to Republicans, even worse—was a partner at the Democratic law firm Perkins Coie, which had played a key role in funding the “dossier” that purported to place Trump in a Moscow hotel room with hookers urinating on a bed where the Obamas had once slept.

Elias was, most Republicans seemed to agree, the best election lawyer in the country. He could really steal an election. He was the center of a “system” and a “machine” that would bend election laws in the Democrats’ favor. That’s what they were up against.

One of the people in the meeting was a young lawyer named Jenna Ellis, whom Trump had personally recruited after seeing her on television and who had recently joined the campaign. She was now a favorite for, in addition to her pleasing television performances, telling the president that Democrats were challenging “election security standards” (i.e., rigging the election). Another person in the meeting was Justin Clark, a longtime election lawyer and Trump White House staffer and now campaign aide. Ellis and Clark had clashed the week before, on a panel at CPAC, the yearly gathering of professional conservatives. Ellis, with no discernible expertise on election issues, other than that the president had posted her to his campaign, argued that the Democrats were trying to undermine the system and, in fact, the Constitution itself. Clark, the professional election lawyer, said mostly that, actually, both Democrats and Republicans traditionally fought to maximize their procedural advantages at the polls and that, in the end, mostly fighting to a draw, elections were won by the better candidate with the better campaign and with the better message—and not because of election rules.