“I don’t blame you. I blame my people,” he says now, happily dismissing any sourness—by which he means, I infer, that his “people” had talked too much to me or had not given me enough time to talk with him.

Taking his seat in the middle of the Living Room in Mar-a-Lago, he looked good, relaxed and like he’d lost weight. I complimented him without mentioning the weight.

Jason Miller was sitting on the couch taking notes, as was, next to him, Margo, the new Hope. In a brief conversation with Miller beforehand about my focus here, Miller had suggested, in the interest of keeping the conversation going, that I not bring up January 6 or another subject that I said I was curious about, and about which I had heard Trump had a conspiratorial view: Jeffrey Epstein. “I wouldn’t go there, necessarily,” said Miller. Otherwise, anywhere was fine.

In fact, otherwise was not really the point, because Trump was going where he wanted anyway.

If the election was rigged, I wondered, then what did he think was the real number—what had he won it by without any interference?

Into the loop—with hardly a breath: