Thinking this might be a humbling moment, Stepien pitched Trump on the idea of coming out of the hospital and taking a new, softer tone: You’re a grandfather … and we need to be safe … and all do the right thing … and look after one another. Here was an opportunity, Stepien saw, to show a completely different side of this guy. And Trump got it, Stepien thought. He bought it. He understood.

Except, then the president broke out of the hospital and did his indomitable, nothing-touches-me, boss-man ride around the hospital grounds, exposing aides and his Secret Service detail to the virus, and on his return to the White House, proclaimed how “powerful” he felt—taking, Stepien noted to others dryly, “a different approach.”

Crises in Trumpworld almost always became an opportunity for sycophants and promoters promising to save Trump from whatever trouble he was in.

Fox’s Sean Hannity, whose own career and identity were now intricately tied to Trump and who was despairing about the state of the campaign, was calling the president in a daily panic about the campaign’s advertising—it sucked. “You’re not speaking to people the right way,” he told the president.

In turn the president, complained to his campaign aides: “We’re not speaking to people the right way.”

But Hannity had a solution. He’d personally written just the ad Trump should be running. (“Joe Biden: Radical, Corrupt, Extreme, and Dangerous.” And then a further enumeration, with pictures: Socialist; Green New Deal; Amnesty and Sanctuary Cities; Law Enforcement.)

“I’m just trying to be helpful,” Hannity said, now constantly hectoring the campaign team. “I don’t want anything.”

To keep Hannity from complaining more to the president, who would then complain more to the campaign, the campaign produced Hannity’s sixty-second ad—and, at the cost of nearly $2 million, ran it only on Hannity’s show.

Rudy Giuliani, the ultimate Trump freelancer, repeatedly sidelined, now stepped forward again with a deus ex machina that resembled nothing so much as Nixon’s discovery of Alger Hiss’s Pumpkin Papers (notes and microfilm said to prove that Hiss was a spy stashed in a literal hollowed-out pumpkin in his backyard). In the final days of the election, Giuliani had located, in a computer fix-it shop in Delaware, a hard drive purported to belong to Hunter Biden which Giuliani claimed contained emails linking Joe Biden to the same alleged foreign corruption to which Giuliani and Trump had previously tried to link Hunter and, hence, his father, resulting in Trump’s 2019 impeachment.

If the Democrats seemed briefly stricken by what might be revealed by Hunter’s alleged hard drive, the confusion, oddness, and general harebrained quality of all Giuliani’s efforts and gambits reliably overshadowed any point he was trying to make.