No, it had to be fought. He made the obvious point: most of the people who voted by mail wouldn’t be voting for Trump.

Somehow, to accept mail-in voting or even not to oppose it was, for Trump, to capitulate to a greater effort to attack and undermine him—mail-in voting was a symbol of the forces against him. Already he was far down the rabbit hole of predicting a stolen election on the basis of mail-in voting. He could not now encourage people to vote by mail, even if by doing so he might increase his share of the mail-in vote by enough to win the election.

Stepien and McCarthy tried painstakingly to explain the different kinds of mail-in voting, some of it not at all part of what the president was against, and to point out how he was discouraging all Republican mail-in voters.

“What if the weather is bad in Pennsylvania on Election Day?” a frustrated Stepien asked.

“Unsolicited,” Stepien and McCarthy suggested as the word he should use, unsolicited ballots, that’s what he was against, right? “Can you just say you’re against unsolicited ballots?” They hoped that message adjustment might help at least a little bit.

He didn’t like it—it all still seemed suspicious to him and wrong not to show up on Election Day. It was how they would steal it.

But as with many meandering Trump meetings—well, they were all meandering—if you stayed long enough he might get bored and agree. So, yes, he would say “unsolicited”—at least until he stopped saying it.

By the time of the Democratic National Convention, on August 17, Trumpworld had reached another new polling low.

Jason Miller had suggested in a convention planning meeting, only half humorously, that they send the president to Taiwan on the day of Biden’s acceptance speech, which, while it might start World War III, would at least get them the news cycle.

At this point, among Trump enemies and allies, earnest conjecture began about how a man with a long history of refusing to acknowledge defeat would handle a precise numerical reckoning against him. Trump enemies, those associated with the Biden campaign and other outside liberal groups, began strategic discussions and planning for far-flung Trump scenarios (i.e., how he might try to hold on to office), reports of which fueled Trump’s conviction of an organized effort to deny him reelection and force him from power—“the steal” was fast becoming anything that might keep him from winning the election.

And yet the president also had a preternatural confidence. How could he possibly lose to Joe Biden?

He had really never wavered in his belief that he was a natural winner and Biden an obvious loser. Such was Trump’s own salesman-like certainty that Andy Stein, a New York City political figure and a Democrat who had known Trump for many years, was absolutely convinced by his frequent and sometimes daily calls with the president that, despite almost all polls saying otherwise and despite his Democratic friends telling him he was smoking something, there was no way Trump could lose.