For four years, Graham had tried to negotiate, flatter, or appease Trump to his own advantage, with highly mixed results. They had become regular golfing companions, and perhaps their bond was real. “We’re golf buddies,” Trump explained in a singular moment of reflection. “Something different when you play golf with someone, different than having a phone call or meeting; you spend hours with a person. When you golf with someone you get to know them at a much different level.” Which possibly explained what had often seemed to be Graham’s tortured or absurd efforts to rationalize the behavior of the president—golf.

Graham, on the golf course, suggested a set of South Carolina lawyers, led by a local Republican fixture, Butch Bowers. Then Graham jumped the gun and dropped the news in a Republican Senate conference call—with Trump having had only one conversation with Bowers the night before.

With Bowers inadvertently hired—not to mention Schoen somewhere in the mix—Bruce Castor was shortly notified that he was off the case before he was actually put on the case. Meanwhile, the president, who in a few more phone calls had now convinced himself that Schoen was definitely his main man, told Schoen that he would be in charge of Bowers: “You’ll be the quarterback.”

But Graham was telling everybody that Bowers was the president’s top guy.

The collective response to Bowers was: “Who? Why this guy? What is Lindsey up to?” (Schoen was so under-profile that his name was not even coming up.) But the price was right: Bowers, in his introductory call with the president, said he’d do it for $250,000.

But a few days later, Bowers called Jason Miller, who, through the attrition of most everyone else, had become a central Trump impeachment manager.

“I’ve got a little bit of an issue here,” said Bowers to Miller, “and I’m hoping you could help me out. It’s just that I told the president it would be two hundred fifty thousand dollars, and he seemed good with that, but I didn’t tell him what the cost would be for the whole team.”

“And? That would be?” asked Miller, with a sinking sensation.

“Probably more in the three million area. If you could run that by him.”

“You want me to tell Donald J. Trump that the cost of the deal just went up by two and three-quarter million dollars? I think you are going to have to make that call.”

“And so ended,” Miller reported to a friend, “the brief and terrifying glory of Butch Bowers.”

With less than two weeks to go until the start of his impeachment, Donald Trump now had only David Schoen, a lawyer without staff or support or, it appeared, much self-confidence.

“You can do it,” said the president.