Still, to the degree that she was trying to position herself as the outsider saying what the president wanted to hear to the insiders, who weren’t saying what he wanted to hear, she was nevertheless trying to keep within basic, if outer, bounds. In a midweek discussion, the president asked her about the “mayor”—that is, Giuliani. Ellis heaped fulsome flattery on the mayor—a passionate advocate, she said. But she suggested, too, that, given the complicated dimensions of the legal struggle ahead, perhaps, she now recommended, it ought to be led by a litigator (that is, a real lawyer, rather than merely a television one)—someone, she suggested, like Jay Sekulow, who had been the president’s lawyer (his actual rather than television lawyer) during the Mueller investigation and his impeachment.

But Sekulow was among the insiders not rising enough to the pitch of certainty, outrage, and war that Trump was looking to hear. In fact, he was telling almost everybody else on the campaign and White House legal teams that he wanted nothing to do with this mess.

Even the gung-ho and opportunistic Ellis understood with some trepidation that to be part of this new team she was going to have to accept quite an open-ended sense of mission.

To the campaign and West Wing staff, there was now little doubt about the trends that would lose them their must-keep electoral votes. It was a clear and, for many, an I-told-you-so outcome: the Democrats, seizing on the COVID excuse, had pushed for mail-in voting and had encouraged their people to use this new privilege, while the Republicans had discouraged it, and therein lay the Democrats’ thin margin—and it would be thin. Indeed, the Democrats, clearly without the landslide they had predicted, were saved by this lucky emphasis; that was all they were saved by.

But it was enough.

And so little that you could believe that mail-in voting was the margin of fraud—that is, if that’s what you wanted to believe. After all, they would not have won without their mail-in votes, which, even with no one identifying precise issues, were technically more susceptible to funny business than votes cast at the ballot box. Hence, well, fraud … maybe, which became obviously.