But, more to the point, the immediate downer here was going to be the president. So far, up in the White House Residence, he had been happy and optimistic; that was easy to deal with. Now the entire enterprise would have to shift to Trump maintenance.

Meadows, Kushner, Miller, Stepien, and Clark, with Oczkowski in tow—Hicks, still recovering from COVID, was a noted absence—assembled and went upstairs. The president, Ivanka and her brothers Don Jr. and Eric, and the First Lady’s chief of staff and press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, were waiting. You exited the elevator into a big hallway on the main Residence floor—the hallway ran the entire length of the White House. Everyone stood in a distended circle outside the Trump bedroom area, in some halfhearted or half-embarrassed effort at social distancing.

Trump was back in his suit and tie, dark, grim, ripshit, muttering, repeating to himself, “What the fuck? How can they call this? We’re winning. And everybody can see we are going to win. Everybody’s calling to say that we’re winning. And then they pull this.” Again and again, the same refrain.

Oczkowski, stammering—this among the few times he had ever come face-to-face with Trump—tried to argue that his model was correct, that they would win. Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, had his own model, which also had them winning, said Oczkowski. They would win.

Eric Trump kept grilling members of the campaign staff: “Where are these votes in Arizona coming from? How is this happening? You said we were good.”

The Fox call was just wrong, insisted a flustered Oz. It was inexplicable.

It was, interjected Trump, the fucking Murdochs.

Here was a delicate and worried circle, with everyone trying to avoid eye contact. Making matters even more excruciating, Stephanie Grisham was utterly wasted, keening as though there had been a death.

Desperately, Oczkowski kept repeating, “When the votes come in, we’ll win,” and then doubling down on his certainty: “Absolutely, we’re going to win.” He had the numbers for anybody to see.

The president’s rage was entirely on Fox—it wasn’t Arizona; it wasn’t Oczkowski’s model. He knew they had won. It was Fox. It was about the Murdochs, who were always trying to fuck him. He was the golden goose at Fox, and what did that get him? They owed him, but they had screwed him. In his Hobbesian worldview, people were always trying to take things from him. Indeed, it seemed clear—clear as day to him. He had won Arizona, everybody said. But Fox and the Murdochs, for perfidious, disloyal, and very mean reasons, were trying to steal it from him. This was for him, in a psychological realm beyond an election tally, a vastly more personal place. It was not about the numbers; it was about the motives. The motive was to fuck him.