Afterward, the president moved with some seeming uncertainty, even aimlessness, into the Map Room, followed by his family and stay-close retinue. Suddenly, the Map Room was overcrowded and, most everyone noted to themselves, a super-spreader setting.

Oz was still focused on Arizona, with confidence that it would come back to them, but this did not yet seem reassuring to the president. Then the focus moved to Wisconsin. A big data release was due at 3:30 a.m. The expectation was that this might nail it for them. They could leave Election Night in a strong position, the momentum with them. Except, 3:30 passed without new numbers from Wisconsin. Everybody waited, without much to say, anxiety ramping up, the president muttering: Why the delay? What was happening? Had they stopped counting? What was going on?

Giuliani was hotly remonstrating—exactly what he said would happen was happening, he insisted. They now knew how many Biden votes they needed to offset Trump votes, and they were producing them! That’s what the delay was about.

The president stayed for twenty minutes longer, becoming more and more agitated and angry before leaving for the Residence.

Matt Morgan, the election lawyer, who had been in the Map Room for much of the evening, left shortly after 4 a.m., driving home for a few hours of sleep before getting back in first thing. On the drive home, it struck him that Wisconsin was on Central Time. The new data would hit when it was supposed to hit. They had just gotten the time zones wrong.

3

NEW VOTES

If Arizona was the gut punch, the 4:30 a.m. Eastern Time drop from Wisconsin was, at least for the realists when they woke up on Wednesday morning, the seeming knockout blow.

Nick Trainer, the campaign’s political director (at home with COVID, the second time he’d contracted it during the campaign) with the closest contacts in the state, gave an early morning assessment that their four-figure lead in Wisconsin was soon likely to slip away.

Without Wisconsin, they had minimal chances of holding the map.

And yet …

“I spoke to state party guys up there, and they think there are some scraps that might allow us to claw back. Going to be a fight into tomorrow to see what is really left out,” Oz reported after the Wisconsin data drop.

The innermost team (Kushner, Hicks, Scavino, Stepien, Miller, Clark, and Herschmann) convened on a call on Wednesday morning. Each was perfectly aware of the equivocal nature of where they stood. But the emphasis in the discussion that morning was still on the potential for a positive outcome in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona (despite Fox). They were under pressure but still up in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and trailing but seeing the potential for recovery in Arizona. The discussion, however, was not about the difficulties of holding on, difficulties apparent to all, but that the current numbers would be an encouraging balm for the president.