Trump’s rush to the hospital on Friday, October 2, was a black ops affair. The immediate staff knew no more than the outside world. Stepien assumed Meadows knew, but he could not get Meadows on the phone. The others closest to the president, Hicks and Scavino, didn’t know—or, if they did know, they weren’t letting anyone else know. (In fact, it was Meadows on the helicopter with the president to Walter Reed hospital—with Scavino following.) The family didn’t know. The vice president didn’t know. Never a model of effective communication, the Trump White House now with the king’s life in the balance, closed down authoritarian-style. Was he dying?

More than a few staffers went so far as to mordantly suggest that this was his way out of a hopeless campaign.

And then he rose like a phoenix. Again.

As surprising as the rush to the hospital was his apparent recovery a day later. Although they tried not to admit it, there was a not-infrequent sense among the president’s aides that he had magical properties. To the extent that people stayed with him, this was one of the reasons. Not just that he survived, and not just that he survived what nobody thought he could survive, but that he did it so often. Why bet against him?

Trump blamed getting COVID on Chris Christie, who would himself come down with the virus a few days later (and spend a week in the ICU). Christie had sat across from him at the debate prep table, and Trump had seen the spittle come out of his mouth and tried to duck from the droplets.

Blaming Christie probably had less to do with the reasonable likelihood that the former governor had in fact given COVID to Trump—or, for that matter, Trump might as easily have given it to him—than with how incensed he was at Christie for viciously attacking him “like he meant it” during the debate prep, and for the part this had played in getting the president so wound up that he overplayed his hand with Biden.

In fact, among those in the debate sessions, it was Hope Hicks who got COVID first, and the president would accuse her as well of giving it to him, but affectionately, teasingly, because, in fact, it was Christie who had really given it to him, he was convinced—and who would be, from thereon out, exiled from the Trump circle.

Kushner, Scavino, and Meadows, all in elaborate PPE gear, took up their posts in the president’s hospital room. Stepien and Jason Miller were on the phone. The president’s nearly overnight COVID resurrection was, to Trump if to no one else, a sign that the campaign—dragged down by COVID, the economy, and the Black Lives Matter protests and whacked, in the eleventh hour, by the debate and now, unimaginably, insurmountably, by the weird poetic justice of his being struck down by the virus he had worked so hard to deny—was itself going to rise again.