“John Eastman—very smart guy—John Eastman said that what Mike Pence did was a dishonor to our country. A very brilliant constitutional lawyer—and he was out there—but there were many others …

“Oh, look at my Sarah”—Sarah Huckabee Sanders—“Boy you look so fantastic. You know Michael Wolff—”

Sanders, the press secretary at the time of the publication of Fire and Fury and the point person in the tumultuous week of the White House trying to respond to the book and to brand me as enemy number one, did something of a slo-mo double take, seeing me there with the president.

The subject of Pence now led to Trump’s unhappiness with Pence’s job as the administration’s COVID overseer; which led straightaway to Trump’s own fantastic job of getting the vaccine developed in short order; and now to Andrew Cuomo, whom he had once thought would replace Biden as his Democratic opponent, and whether he would be able to hold on to his office.

“Andrew is a thug—but I’m amazed. I thought he had total control of all those upstaters. I thought he had the state totally under control.” This seemed to spur him on to a free association on other political antagonists.

“Mitch [McConnell] is the most unpopular politician in the country. Mitch was losing his election—went up twenty points, and then he won. Mitch was down by three or four. I’m very popular in Kentucky. I won a lot of states by a lot. Amy McGrath [McConnell’s Democratic opponent] had ninety-one million in the bank. I did a commercial for him—he goes up by twenty points. So, I’m not a fan of Mitch—actually never was—but I got a lot of judges approved. But Mitch is the most overrated politician in Washington …