It was, too, another perk of the White House. Where in other White Houses who the president saw was closely vetted, Trump often used the Oval Office for its fanciful possibilities—he could invite in anyone he wanted, could divert, distract, or occupy himself with any suggestion or unconventional thought under the sun, including, however briefly, martial law.

It was something he would miss: that any course of action he could think of or any proposal made to him was, because he was president, at least nearly possible, even if not truly possible.

Pardons were a power that from the beginning of his term had particularly excited him because they represented unlimited power. He could simply pardon anyone he wanted to pardon. On his own say-so. But now they had become quite a bother—too many pardon possibilities, too many details, too many people—and the finality annoyed him: he needed to pardon people now because there would be no chance to pardon them later.

The traditional system of pardon recommendations coming through the White House Counsel’s Office—a system through which the Obama administration issued far more pardons than the Trump administration free-for-all ever would, almost 2,000 grants of clemency to Trump’s 238—suffered as all systems suffered in the Trump White House and because Trump had long dismissed the Counsel’s Office as not doing enough for him.

The pardon process therefore became a function of getting his attention, never easy for something not already on his mind or not primarily related to him; or of working through Kushner, who appeared to have the unilateral ability to exercise the pardon power; or of working through the handful of people still around Trump who might, just might, have the opportunity to slip somebody in.

Trumpworld was now specifically focused on this. Everybody had a client—Matt Schlapp, the CPAC impresario, would make $750,000 for advocating a pardon for Georgia-based Trump fundraiser Parker “Pete” Petit, convicted of securities fraud. (He didn’t get it; it was a wasted $750,000.)

Indeed, since the election, and with the knowledge that these were now the countdown days, pardons had become something of a Trump cottage industry. The Counsel’s Office and other aides gave up trying to police the paid advocates from those trying to do what they thought was a good deed.