Trump, fulminating, crossing over into fury, directed everybody to call somebody: Jared to call Rupert; Jared to call Hope and to have her call Lachlan; Miller to call Bill Sammon, the Fox News Washington Bureau chief and part of the election decision desk. Call. Do something. Call everybody. Fight this. They have to undo this. They have to!

Undoing became the president’s focus. This has to be undone!

The Murdochs, in repeated calls, washed their hands of the matter. It wasn’t their decision … no. Nothing, you understand, they could reasonably do. Even if they wanted to.

There was a Rashomon version of the president’s call with Karl Rove that evening. In this, it didn’t take place at 10:30 p.m., but long after Fox’s Arizona call at 11:20. Kushner reached out to Rove and said the president was coming apart about Fox, and could Rove call him and say there was still a long way to go. Rove made the call and told the president to hang in there. This wasn’t congratulations. It was solace.

The president was still hearing a tempered yet optimistic—though significantly less so as the night went on—report on election data: Oczkowski’s numbers were slipping but showing that they would make it.

Still, Stepien was hearing that Rudy Giuliani, who had begun the night at a table amid the four hundred guests in the East Room (one of Giuliani’s guests, Healy Baumgardner, would come down with COVID the next day) but then roamed through the White House, was getting through to the president with a message that had a much different emphasis, initiating what aides knew to be a dangerous game: You’ve won the election, and they are going to try to steal it from you.

“He’s just telling him things that are not true,” an unnerved Stepien relayed to the inner circle of Trump advisors, Meadows, Miller, and Clark.

The four men got Rudy aside—in the China Room, with its display of pieces from every president’s table settings. Rudy had had too much to drink, which seemed perilous among all the porcelain and fine dishes lining the walls, and was fumbling through his devices, looking for numbers. He was full of intensity and weird math.

Clark noted that he had not seen Rudy for the entire campaign.

“We’ve won! We need to declare victory!” Rudy kept saying.

“What do you know that we don’t know?” said Stepien, trying to delicately humor him.

“Because if we don’t say we won, they will steal it from us,” declared Giuliani in a new twist, again rifling through his devices for random numbers. “Look, we’ve won Michigan!”

“We haven’t won Michigan,” said Stepien.

“We have to say we won it! Otherwise they will steal it!”