It was a complicated dance because it seemed clear, or everyone clearly understood, that while the agenda was to plan for the post-presidency, you could not talk about Trump’s not being president. The segue was instead into some further station of importance, influence, and power. Nothing diminished here.

Stepien had come prepared with PowerPoint printouts, but he seemed also careful not to lead the conversation, not to want the president to expect him to lead anything, to speak only when spoken to.

That is, the president was being humored.

And yet, too, all these men knew that much of what went on around Donald Trump at any given time was in part to humor him. Of course, such efforts to go along passively with or cater to him often took on a life of their own—so, these men proceeded carefully and hesitantly, treading lightly lest their willingness to humor him led where none of them necessarily wanted to go.

Nobody could yet imagine a post-Trump Trumpworld, either as a joke or as a new dimension in American political life.

The president, for his part, had no doubt that he would be left with control of the Republican Party. A little-known campaign feature was a series of conference calls—his “TeleRallies”—nearly sixty of them that had been set up in various congressional districts during the campaign season. These calls, promoted through the Trump list, attracted anywhere from five thousand to as many as forty thousand people, with the president dialing in to speak for five or ten minutes (or, of course, sometimes longer). This was, in his mind, the unbeatable advantage—only he could attract these kinds of numbers, and these numbers were what tipped the races. He blamed the failure to recapture the House on the failure of the NRCC, the Republican House campaign arm, and of House leader Kevin McCarthy to give him more races to swing.

“We won every one of them.” He now reprised his somewhat inflated recollection for the three men.

Stepien outlined some of what they had done in the past with endorsements and how they might continue to do that now, laying out the process they had used to decide on who would get his support. Here was one of the things that the president most liked to do: hold people’s fate in his hands, to reward friends and punish enemies, because whoever was endorsed paid this back not just in strict political loyalty but also with abject flattery.

Stepien’s PowerPoint bulleted the House and Senate members who appeared to favor impeachment. This, in the post-presidency (or the don’t-mention-that-it-is-post-presidency) was mission critical, to punish the faithless.

Trump came particularly back to Governor Brian Kemp, in Georgia, because much of how he saw his own future was in destroying Kemp’s future. (In the ensuing days, he would add more such off-with-their-heads figures; it was not enough that he should live, but that they should die.)