There were a half dozen practice sessions over the summer, in the White House or Bedminster. Trump was more focused than he usually cared or was able to be. He seemed to be enjoying the easy layup here. Shooting fish in a barrel. The prep team ran old video clips of Biden. Since 1988, Biden had been saying the same old things. Economy, military, race—same canned answers every time. Anytime he went off script, he crashed and burned. “Everybody has a plan,” said an even-more-confident-than-usual Trump, quoting Mike Tyson, “until they get punched in the face.”

If Biden’s insubstantiality got under Trump’s skin—quite the personal insult that they would be considered equals on a stage!—the president was also in an ever-building fulmination against the moderator, precise and unshakeable Fox anchor Chris Wallace. Wallace had become, for Trump, a fly in the Fox ointment. The president regarded Fox’s devotion to him as his due and took its slights more personally and more bitterly than all others. Doubts on Fox struck Trump as the deepest disloyalty. A fifth column. If he couldn’t count on Fox, what could he count on? Also, in his mind, these feelings had gotten mixed up with memories of Wallace’s father, Mike Wallace, a grand figure of a former media age—60 Minutes correspondent, talk show host, New York City social figure, confidant of the rich and famous—with whom Trump seemed to identify. Chris Wallace was a shadow of his father, and why did Trump have to deal with him? (Trump made this comparison explicit in various tweets and constant mutterings. It seemed to amuse him to compare the seventy-three-year-old Chris Wallace with his dead dad.)

There were scores to be settled in this debate, and Trump was always at his most satisfied—most expansive, even—when he was set to settle a score.

Hope Hicks, whose presence reliably calmed the president, was in the prep sessions. There was also Dan Scavino, who’d worked at Trump’s golf course in Westchester County, New York, and then become his social media guy (his Twitter guy), and who, after most everyone else in the administration had fallen aside, had become the person who probably spent the most time with the president.

Bill Stepien was there with Jason Miller and Stephen Miller, the president’s speechwriter and primary holder of the right-wing policy portfolio. Meadows and Kushner drifted in and out of the room. Kellyanne Conway, who had recently left the White House—largely because of the obstreporous public campaign against the president by her husband, George Conway—was back playing Chris Wallace. Chris Christie was playing Biden.

Debate prep was a sought-after ticket, partly because Trump was in a reliably good mood. Reince Priebus, the president’s first chief of staff, managed to grab an invite for a session. Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham tried but failed. Rudy Giuliani came once, but no one wanted him back. His phone rang constantly, and he couldn’t shut it off. He shuffled endless pieces of paper without being able to find what he was looking for. He couldn’t work his iPad to bring up what he wanted to show, reliably stalling meetings. And he went down rabbit holes—they could get Hunter Biden, if they could just find the guy who signed the forms to get Hunter the waiver to get into the military. And he passed gas, constantly.