That’s what the group huddled on the frozen sidewalk outside the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, later that Monday morning, headless chicken–like, was trying to do—while at the same time, without preparation or, really, forethought, trying to defend a president from gross ignominy. They were fixing the typos. NOW!

“Are these lawyers the stupidest?” Trump fumed on the phone to anyone who would listen. “Are they the stupidest?”

Quite the larger problem, now overshadowed by the typo drama, was that the fourth impeachment trial in U.S. history, scheduled to start the next day, was to be argued by lawyers who’d entered the case only a week ago. Of the three main lawyers, Castor, David Schoen, and Mike van der Veen, Trump hadn’t personally met any of them and had not even spoken to van der Veen (who, indeed, would be the only lawyer to emerge with some lasting respect from Trump).

Castor sat in the Mercedes G Wagon waiting to go to the Capitol for a walk-through and to meet the Republican Senate staff. In addition, there were a Jeep Rubicon and a Range Rover waiting to take the new team to the Senate trial. Castor was still wounded because the Trump guys on the ground wouldn’t let him drive his beloved Corvette to the Capitol door. That was how he had imagined it happening. That was one reason he’d taken the case: that image. “The Corvette is me. It’s like my business card.”

The Trump aides still hanging in—at this point, largely beyond surprise—could hardly believe it. Reading the room had often, to say the least, been a problem in Trump circles, but a Corvette at the U.S. Capitol still reeling from the violent attack being laid at the president’s feet?

Trump’s lawyers—not these lawyers, but the lawyers who had been Trump’s lawyers, some on the first impeachment, but who were trying to be nowhere near out front on this impeachment mess—were, in turn, being reamed out by the former president over these new lawyers: “Who are they? Where did they come from? Who hired them? How come I always get the worst lawyers?”

Somehow, for no reason that seemed particularly clear to anybody, especially to Castor and Schoen and the rest of Trump’s new lawyers, Trump’s legal point person was Eric Herschmann. Herschmann had appeared in Trumpworld a year ago, during the last impeachment, and he’d continued to hang around, variously assigned to oversee the White House Counsel’s Office and then as a campaign and West Wing political advisor—he was one more of the people the president’s son-in-law and senior-most aide, Jared Kushner, had designated as a presidential babysitter.