The specter that the Trump administration might somehow prevent the Biden administration from taking power had now quite reversed itself. Its final two weeks had been taken from it. There was, practically speaking, no Trump administration left, certainly not one capable of any action.

Meadows came in late on the seventh. Molly Michael, the president’s assistant, was in. So were the Secret Service agents. And Dan Scavino. But there were not more than a handful of other staffers in the West Wing.

Several midlevel staffers had a back-and-forth with one another from their homes, conferring on how they might adjust their résumés to reference White House work but not specifically that it was work for Donald Trump or even for the Trump White House—yes, and about getting Trump’s name off their social media bios.

The shared experience of most staffers—those still on the payroll and those who had, in the preceding weeks, quietly slipped out the back—was to watch over and over again the same video clips. All of them, accustomed to seeing this presidency through the television, were riveted to this new view of it and now seeing their own fates in it. The eternal back-and-forth over what Trump’s actions might mean for the Trump White House, or for the Republican Party, or for the base, had profoundly shifted to what they might mean personally for everyone associated with him. Now everybody was going to get canceled.

The president, though, in suit and shiny solid-color tie, was still tucked in behind the Resolute desk. For a man, an 11–6 man, who liked to be out of the office, he was close to the last man left in it.

Kushner came in late on the seventh. Having largely missed the debacle—when the going got tough, Jared was nowhere to be found—he returned to his role as the adult in the room. Time for damage control, if a day late and a dollar short. It was Kushner, as he had in other crises, trying to force an awkward rewrite. Never able to specifically confront his father-in-law, Kushner depended on these vacuum moments—those rare occasions when the president was caught speechless, which never lasted very long—to rush in with something like conventional reason and wisdom.

A script was hammered out, overriding the president who otherwise wasn’t changing his tune: “The election was stolen—incredible anger about people having their election stolen. Fraud like you won’t believe. Focus on that!” he repeated almost word for word to everyone he spoke to. But whereas he was usually the only voice in the room, now, however briefly, he was reduced to a lonely voice without anyone truly listening to him.

The script was handed to him in the Oval Office, and he walked to the East Room to deliver it. It was a body-double speech in a two-minute, forty-one-second video clip: