Clark felt personally sure that the Trump campaign, in these still-early COVID days, was well-positioned for a convincing win and that they had election process issues under control. Ellis, as the meeting ended without clear resolution or plan, huddled with the president with the urgent message that the Democrats could win only by letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry vote. That’s how they would steal it, in some unacknowledged irony, by making it easier for people to vote.

He also often seemed to see the election as something personally directed against him, inherently somehow unfair, putting it remarkably bluntly: “They are using the election against me.”

On August 7, Trump aides and pollsters reconvened at Bedminster—McLaughlin in person, Fabrizio on the phone. Bedminster had hopeful airs of a British gentlemen’s club, but looked more like a steak restaurant. Everybody was gathered around a conference table, each with Trump-branded water bottles—and with intense air-conditioning.

The message was clear: mail-in voting, which the president was so bitterly trying to oppose, would be the sea-change factor in this election. Almost 70 percent of the electorate would vote early.

The advice was unambiguous: while mail-in ballots would help the Democrats, militant opposition to mail-in ballots would dramatically compound the Republicans’ disadvantage.

Trump’s resistance to the logic here was painful.

In the age of COVID, in-person voting would surely be depressed and, already clear, mail-in ballots would be the attractive default option—hence, the Trump pollsters argued, you obviously wanted to encourage your supporters to vote however they might want to do it. But, in the president’s mind, this now had become part of the COVID forces and strategy aligned against him. COVID was the way for the Democrats not only to ruin his beautiful economy but also to steal his election—by getting people who would otherwise not vote, the “low-propensity” voters, Democratic voters, to cast ballots.

Stepien, the new campaign manager, only a few weeks into the job, tried to argue that they had a better ground game than the Democrats and could get mail-in voting to work in their favor.

In an effort to lessen his own exposure to the president’s wrath and resistance, Stepien brought in the Republican House leader, Kevin McCarthy, for a follow-up meeting in the Oval Office to help argue the case—“My Kevin,” in Trump’s term of endearment and ownership. The Republican Party was sending out voter request forms and getting a 2 or 3 percent response, McCarthy explained, where they should have been getting closer to 15 percent.

The president seemed not to understand.

He, argued McCarthy, with surprising pointedness, was depressing the response rate.

Of the various kinds of mail-in voting (Trump himself was a mail-in voter in Florida)—absentee, request, universal mail—Trump generally confused them all, casting aspersions on people who voted in any way but at a polling station on Election Day, and making it somehow a Trump virtue to show up in person. Couldn’t he just shut up a bit on the subject?