It wasn’t that different from any political discussion in Trump’s White House: identifying allies and their level of devotion and enemies and their level of perfidy (pausing to tune up the television for a moment’s distraction). Surreal in how normal it was.

As if January 6 hadn’t changed anything.

“We can do it again,” he pronounced. And then he rephrased it as a question that he had already answered: “Do you think we can do it again?” And he added: “There’s nobody else.”

Yes, everything continued. Everything could continue.

He was back in the driver’s seat. He was questioning his campaign manager, pushing him, looking for confirmation.

Although, and this was not necessarily a departure from the past, there was still no actual battle plan, or budget, or structure—nor, in the end, was there a person to call.

Miller, still technically working for the campaign, left the White House to drive home to Arlington, while the president and his diminished party left for the round trip to Texas and remarks and a photo op at the border wall.

On the way, he took a call from Kushner.

“Can you reach out,” Kushner asked, “and see if we can get some coverage for this event from the networks?”

“I’m in the car,” Miller told Kushner. “Isn’t there someone in the White House comms shop who can make these calls? This is an official trip, not a campaign trip.”

“In fact, there isn’t,” said a plaintive Kushner. “Nobody. There’s really nobody left.”

Miller pulled to the side of the road and texted each of the networks. Only MSNBC bit, and they wouldn’t consider live coverage without an advance copy of the president’s remarks and a pledge that he would stick to them. Nobody was about to trust an off-script Trump.

On the fifteenth, there was a brief press kerfuffle when Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO, showed up for a meeting with the president, and reporters caught sight of notes he’d written on a yellow legal pad that might suggest he was advising the president on a declaration of martial law.

The bedding pitchman and former cocaine and gambling addict as a coup plotter was the kind of preposterousness that Trumpers judged unfair for the press to take so seriously. There would of course be no MyPillow coup. But the truer point was that Trump would entertain almost anyone farther out and more abject in his or her belief in the extreme than he was. It was a contrast that may have reinforced his own sense of sanity, leaving him as a voice of moderation.