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.

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.