On most Election Nights after hard-fought and expensive races, and especially Election Nights in a presidential race, there is among senior-most professionals and those closest to the candidate a heightened sense of probable outcome—uncertainty existed only within a narrow margin. But in the Trump war room that evening, there were any number of people who believed it might be a landslide either way.

One floor up, in the East Room, four hundred guests (cabinet people, congressional allies, contributors, friends of contributors, and friends of White House friends) were gathered. The mood, a true believer’s mood, was full of excitement, a palpable thrill that it was going to happen again, all the more thrilling for the coming smackdown of liberal certainty.

“They’re dead, they’re dead, they’re dead; we won, we won, we won,” repeated the weaving Pirro in the Map Room—or similar words that were growing harder to decipher.

Upstairs, in the Residence, the president was watching election coverage with Melania, his tie off, shirt loosened. The phone wasn’t leaving his hand, one call to the next. He kept checking in with various people in the Map Room, often having each confirm what the person sitting next to them had just told him. He was looking not so much for information, here in a holding pattern before first results, as for confirmation that all was as he had convinced himself it would be: it wasn’t going to be just a win but, kicking it up several levels, a really, really big win. A landslide.

Now … Trump ought reasonably to have had enough information to have maintained a nuanced sense of a complex and teetering map—indeed, he ought to have had as much information on the vagaries and micro-indices of the night as anyone anywhere. But, in fact, he was still getting most of his information either from television, with the networks now confused, if not panicked, by the early Trump numbers; or from the highly edited picture supplied to him by aides who, if bad news was not absolutely necessary to deliver, would surely deliver only good news.

The president was data averse. He was a seventy-four-year-old businessman who did not use a computer and could not work a spreadsheet. He could receive neither email nor texts. He was, in some sense, among the more information-limited people in the nation. In addition, he was averse to his own data expert.