In Phoenix, twenty lawyers hastily gathered at the old Ritz-Carlton (recently converted into a cool, new boutique hotel less hospitable to an old-fashioned backroom election operation) to begin the process of reviewing discarded Republican ballots. Under Arizona rules, if a ballot signature seemed not to match the signature on file, it was thrown out. But if you contacted the voter and he or she affirmed their vote, it would be added back, all quite an exhausting and time-consuming effort.

In some sense, it was reasonable to see this as just what political operatives in tight races did. This was not yet out of the norm. Partly, the president was being appeased. But at the same time, elections were often contested. A process was put in place. This was recognizable behavior. Recounts were frustrating but were standard operating procedure.

The process was still being run by Matt Morgan and Justin Clark, the campaign’s two main lawyers and its elections specialists.

A midthirties, always-wear-a-tie sort, Morgan had worked for Pence before coming over to the campaign, a sign to some that he was a hopeless establishment type. He had coordinated most of the preelection lawsuits over changes to voting rules. All this, though, was less to-the-barricades than it was procedural, by-the-book stuff. If there was a rap on Morgan, it was that he was too much of a paint-by-numbers lawyer, too straight.

Clark, forty-five, was a Wesleyan graduate (possibly the only graduate from the famously liberal school to work for Trump or even vote for him) and a close associate of Bill Stepien’s. He had become a kind of self-appointed sheriff, trying to keep the grifters, kooks, and obvious self-dealers out of Trumptown—and away from the campaign’s money.

In the days after the election, Morgan and Clark came to represent both the procedural election efforts and, even more clearly, the limits on them. They would direct the standard efforts and, it was a given, give up when these were exhausted

Rudy Giuliani, in his growing drumbeat, would put it to the president that his biggest issue could be, as much as voter fraud, Morgan and Clark, who, if there was a problem—and of course there were going to be problems—were not out there, were not getting ready for a fight, would fold like a cheap suit. Who knows where this is going? Rudy argued. But it could go way beyond nobody-type lawyers arguing about a few thousand votes to become quite a different matter, a going-to-the-mattresses matter, of needing to disqualify hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of illegal votes.

Morgan and Clark (not unlike most of the rest of official Trumpworld) saw Giuliani as willing and eager to move beyond standard procedure and into an unknown and unimaginable world.

Here was theTrump White House pattern that in any even momentary relaxation of the palace guard—and now Meadows, the chief doorkeeper, was out with COVID—the waiting peanut gallery slipped in.