If there was widespread fraud, nobody in the Election Day operation had picked up on any of it, certainly not on the mass of irregularities that would surely have surfaced if fraud existed at a game-changing scale in multiple states. At best, some in the campaign and White House were willing to entertain the constitutional argument that election procedures in some states had been, due to COVID, altered to accommodate mail-in voting, in steps that had bypassed the formal approval of state legislatures, as stipulated in the Constitution. Far from a fraud or a steal, but rather, a theoretical argument—one that, even if you could get some judicial buy-in, would yet be unlikely to result in many millions of votes being thrown out. The President’s election lawyers, Morgan and Clark, could not have been more explicit on this point: judges were always reluctant to interfere in elections and no judge was going to cancel thousands, let alone millions, of votes.

At the end of the day on Thursday, Trump was announcing to the Oval Office entourage that he’d had enough of Morgan and Clark and he was going to put somebody else in charge.

In fact, by Friday morning, three days after the election, there was not a single insider voice who believed there was anything greater than the remotest, pie-in-the-sky fantasy that the vote count could be challenged in the (at least) three states they would need to overcome the Biden electoral count, one of them likely needing to be Pennsylvania, with its big electoral vote haul and with its now-substantial Biden lead.

The insiders were planning for at least a somewhat normal future, and indeed, unaware of the other conversations the president was having, or at least the extent of them, they had already begun to leak their version of normalcy. “Hi guys,” wrote the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker on Friday the sixth to the campaign’s comm director, Tim Murtaugh, and the comms staffers, Ali Pardo and Erin Perrine, seeking official comment or confirmation about what her campaign sources were saying: “We plan to report that advisors have broached the idea of an electoral defeat w[ith] Trump on Thursday and Friday, and how he should handle it. We also plan to report that some advisors/allies are coming [sic] that Trump will offer a concession speech where he doesn’t necessarily admit defeat, but says he commits to a peaceful transfer of power to Biden.”

Yes, the insiders, leaking like the Trump White House always leaked, were preparing for the end, letting the media know that, at least for some people, reality and sanity still existed (always one self-protecting thread of Trump leaks).