The liberal press writes wishfully about Trump being silenced and forgotten—squeezing their eyes closed and putting their fingers in their ears. What is he without his social media platforms, after all? Right? Who can hear him? Many Republican professionals believe, on the other hand, that he may now be more central to their lives and careers in defeat than he was in office, with his singular focus on their loyalty, preferably abject, to him.

The Trump proposition is that he is the Republican Party. It simply has no future without him. If he runs again in 2024, he wins the Republican nomination in a “landslide,” says Mitt Romney (reduced by Trump to a lonely martyrdom in the Republican Party). He not only controls the overwhelming share of Republican dollars—and has sent cease-and-desist letters to other Republican entities trying to poach on his brand hegemony—but he believes he has the power of life and death over every Republican officeholder. No Republican office seems too small—the Wyoming GOP chairman has received his blessing. To be near Trump is to benefit from him. Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator, came to Mar-a-Lago for a fundraiser and pulled in five hundred thousand dollars for the evening. Caitlyn Jenner, running as a Republican candidate for governor in California, has sought to hire from the Trump staff—including Brad Parscale, the president’s former personal assistant Madeleine Westerhout, and Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren—with a hope for Trump’s endorsement. Every Republican primary race for 2022 will have, Trump promises, a Trump candidate, with the goal of ruling out all other candidates. Forty-thousand-people Trump rallies yet remain the possible Republican future.

There was, briefly, a rumor that Trump himself would run in 2022 for a House seat and then, in the expectations that Republicans would retake the majority, have himself elected Speaker, and then commence the impeachment of Joe Biden. For Trump aides, though, this was risible. Speaker of the House is a “real job,” and Trump, in no way, is going to actually work.

Rather than being scarred by his defeat, he has weaponized it. His defeat, against practically everybody’s advice, is his issue: the steal. Indeed, election rules have become a central animating issue of the Republican Party. The unlikely and even ridiculous becomes in Trump’s hands righteous and powerful. Trump’s handpicked PAC to fight for “election integrity” is made up of many of the opportunists, freelancers, and inexplicable characters who populate this book: Jenna Ellis, Ken Paxton, Peter Navarro, Bernie Kerik, Sebastian Gorka, and Mirna Tarraf (Giuliani’s entourage member, the twentysomething Lebanese real estate agent!).

There is no brain trust around him, if there ever was one. There are no real advisors, if there ever were any—not, anyway, in the sense of people he might turn to who might know better than he. There are no white papers being prepared. There are no studies in progress.