The president had spoken to Giuliani throughout Tuesday night and become grimmer because of it, and then, on Wednesday, largely rushed him off the phone as he got fairly good news from others. But on Thursday, Giuliani, full of warnings and news of dark stuff, got a longer hearing.

Trump was canvassing for what he wanted to hear, and it was the outsiders who clearly understood the advantages of telling him precisely that: there was no way of explaining it if he hadn’t won, other than that it had been stolen from him—that was the logic proceeding from the “fact” that he couldn’t lose.

Likewise, there was a struggle to be the one who told him what he most wanted to hear. At the same time, while it was important to be extreme, it was equally important to be less extreme than the other extreme voices in a world quickly filling with people competing to be even more extreme. A new insider hierarchy was forming among the outsiders.

Jenna Ellis, Trump’s handpicked television lawyer, was getting a serious hearing. Ellis, an ambitious young woman with scant legal background, had positioned herself on television as a “constitutional lawyer,” according to her frequent chyron. “I love the Constitution,” she would state as her particular and overriding credential. She had gone from a small-town DA’s office in Colorado, to radio and television appearances with a self-published book comparing the Constitution to the Bible, to becoming an official Trump campaign surrogate, to then, with the president catching her frequent appearances, getting an invitation to the Oval Office. Whereupon, after taking admiring notice of both her television performance and her chyron, he hired her in early 2020 as another of his “personal lawyers.”

“You work for me…,” said Trump … and did not have to add … and you report to me … got it?

Ellis had gone with record speed from a person who would say what was necessary to get time on television to a person who would say what was necessary to be Donald Trump’s lawyer. It was confusing to almost everyone else in the White House and the campaign that, at the same time that Ellis was formally attached to the campaign, she seemed able to operate outside it, reporting directly to the president and, through most of the 2020 campaign, whispering election warnings in his ear. Here was a person with no discernible relevant experience and, in a universal opinion, not exactly a legal scholar, helping to provide the basis for a broad constitutional challenge to an American presidential election.

Now, in the days after the election, and going over the heads of the White House and campaign leadership and its ranking lawyers—White House counsel Pat Cipollone and presidential advisor Eric Herschmann in the West Wing and Morgan and Clark on the campaign—Ellis told the president that great constitutional offenses had been committed against him.