Bobulinski was a former Hunter Biden business associate of unclear status—at best, a business partner scorned. Bobulinski, where all other efforts had failed, had a tale that—really, truly, this time—would link the Bidens to international corruption, various Trumpers now believed.

Herschmann and Stefan Passantino, a lawyer who used to be with the White House Counsel’s Office, trying to promote Bobulinski into the campaign’s October surprise, were sure they had the Wall Street Journal taking this story. Trump even let it slip that there was a big story coming in the Journal. But the story they got was a story in the New York Times about how the Journal wasn’t going to run the story. The best they could do was Breitbart, the online right-wing outlet once run by Steve Bannon. (Curiously, Bannon, now a Trumpist podcaster, had joined with Giuliani to promote the Hunter Biden hard-drive story.)

Passantino phoned Jason Miller the morning of the second debate, with the Trump team on its way to Nashville. An off-the-books plot to get Bobulinski to Nashville, to make him an official guest at the debate, was instantly hatched. It recalled Steve Bannon’s recruitment of a lineup of Bill Clinton accusers—Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey—to attend the last Trump-Clinton debate after the “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” Access Hollywood tape came out.

The plan: they’d confront Biden with his son’s accuser and make the accuser available to the press.

Except that it was 8:30 a.m. in Nashville, and Bobulinski was in Los Angeles, and COVID flight restrictions meant he’d never get there in time. So, he’d need to fly private.

Who was going to pay for that?

Well, they’d worry about that later. So, yes, do it.

Except that Bobulinski, now in the air an hour before debate time, couldn’t land because when the president is on the ground, air traffic control shuts down all private flights in the vicinity.

“Oh—wow,” said the president, when told about the plan (and the plane). “Just like when Bannon brought in Juanita Broaddrick.”

They got clearance to land Bobulinski at an airfield a half hour out and sent a fleet of Suburbans to fetch him. He arrived without a dress shirt, requiring an emergency trip to Nordstrom.

The campaign team decided not to risk setting up an official campaign press conference, just in case Bobulinski was nuts; instead they just walked him into the press pool. There Bobulinski displayed the three phones on which he claimed he had texts from Hunter Biden discussing the foreign payoffs with his father.

Still, they were faced with establishment skepticism—October surprise PTSD, aides were calling it—and what, in the president’s mind, would be another aspect of the plot to steal the election from him: the media continuing its blackout on the Biden “scandals.” Fox News covered the press conference live, but everybody else ignored it.