In fact, Oz had found his way to a positive place: “We’re going to win this thing—assuming they don’t find new votes.”

Kushner called his father-in-law and outlined their strength in each state. Maintaining the current map, they would win, the president was told.

Another view began to develop as well: that they had to prepare for war. By 9:30 on Wednesday morning, the pollster John McLaughlin wrote the top White House and election team:

The media is setting us up to allow the Democrats to steal the election.

We need to prove fraud. Are there any precincts in Milwaukee or Detroit or Phila[delphia] where the vote count exceeds the number of registered voters?

Monroe county in Michigan where the President won 43k–26k in 2016 hasn’t reported?

We should treat the leads as victory in AK, ME2 [Maine’s 2nd Congressional District sends an elector separate from the rest of the state], NC and GA so our electoral count is 248 and is higher than Biden’s to counter the media refusing to call those states for the President.

We need to counter their public opinion push.

Dick Morris, copied on McLaughlin’s email, responded to the others on the list with his projections of a win in Pennsylvania by 117,000 votes and a win in Michigan by 147,000.

James O’Keefe, the conservative activist specializing in sting videos, started to circulate a video of a U.S. Postal Service “insider” outlining a litany of abuses in Pennsylvania (all of which would be debunked by federal investigators).

Matt Schlapp, the CPAC moderator and Trump operative, started to tweet about a rumor in Arizona that a large number of Trump-area ballots were being invalidated because of the use of Sharpie markers. (This, also, was untrue).

Boris Epshteyn, who had worked in the White House in the administration’s early months and who was now trying to reinsert himself, announced that, without any clear authorization, he was proactively heading to Arizona for the fight that was sure to happen there.

In some sense, the truest point was that the Trump campaign had no idea what was going on. The campaign’s grip on the numbers, its structure for reporting and disseminating numbers, and its overall information management systems were as chaotic as any in recent presidential campaign history. What’s more, this allowed a large range of outside and unvetted views into the mix and, among the many that found a direct route to Trump, often gave primacy to them.

Not knowing what they should do, they had to do something.

By Wednesday afternoon, fifteen campaign operatives and party heavyweights were dispatched to contested locations to appear on local media. But this, too, was a chaotic process, with the campaign protesting in a panicked email that it hadn’t enough manpower even to handle hotel accommodations. A press conference was scheduled on a street corner in Philadelphia with Eric and Lara Trump, but protestors chased them away.