Meanwhile, the remaining staff was trying to get the usual Trump defenders on television, but in a case of remarkable coincidence, almost the entire list was unavailable—making the Access Hollywood weekend, heretofore the greatest flight from Donald Trump, look something like a celebration of him in comparison. Everybody’s career and future seemed at that moment to be imperiled by their connection to Donald Trump.

McConnell let it be known that he might finally turn on the president. Otherwise a hated figure in the liberal media, McConnell was now given seen-the-light kudos. Behind closed doors, or perhaps strategically half-open ones, McConnell, famously tight-lipped, was venting his true revulsion and taste for revenge. He was talking humiliation, ignominy, and criminal conviction for the soon-to-be former president.

The House would impeach; McConnell, holding enough votes in his hand to shift the Republican balance, would push to convict. Then they would further vote to strip Trump of his right to hold office ever again. After that, let the prosecutors have him. The Republican Party would be done with him and saved. At least that’s what the liberal media was saying. It was practically over.

More immediately, McConnell was holding Trump’s feet near the fire. Even the president himself, quite loathing Mitch as much as Mitch loathed him, got this. If he stepped out of line in the next ten days, Mitch could well and truly blow him up. Or at least they’d be playing chicken to the end. Jared cautioned Trump about Mitch. Warnings about Mitch’s sudden-death power over the president were useful to Kushner, who was also seeking to keep his father-in-law under lock and key.

Amid discussions about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, under which the vice president and cabinet might strip the president of his powers, Trump met with the vice president—groveled even a bit. Marc Short, the president said, was not really banned from the White House. He should swing by, Trump told Pence.

Of all the other times when Trump had appeared neatly boxed in, it now seemed that, after all his other assaults, he had finally found a way to offend a broad American morality, and there was no getting out of it this time. January 6 was an offense that might define a new right of center, where the McConnell-led party could gather against him.

More than at any other point when he seemed to have committed a fatal offense—attacking Gold Star parents, bragging about assaulting women, coddling Russia, extorting Ukraine’s president, threatening a democratic election, all just the tip of his constant daily offenses—this one was going to nail him. He really had no more lives left.