It was Hicks, on the Friday morning call, who firmly shifted the conversation to the preservation of legacy, that the election issues should not become a distraction to the work they now had to do to complete the story of their four years in office—this was now history making. They needed to pick the issues they would want to define them. Unspoken was the understanding that if they did not pivot to a formal ending of the Trump presidency, a futile attempt to hold on to it would be their legacy.

But Trump was locking in on a different view.

In effect, the function of the outsiders was to jazz him up about what he wanted to believe was right and to further assure him that everybody else was wrong.

The West Wing and campaign insiders, no matter that they were members of the often-outré Trump White House, had become part of a standardized political process. They had played the game. They had been focused on winning, and that hadn’t happened. They certainly did not now want to dwell on loss. What’s more, having played, they all pretty much knew why they had lost.

And therefore, the old campaign organization became the enemy, and a new campaign organization, the post-campaign organization, rose in its place. And they were leaking, too. “Advisors have expressed a lot of frustration over the campaign’s legal strategy, saying there was no comprehensive planning ahead of Election Day,” wrote the Wall Street Journal on Friday, November 6, “and little follow through on decisions made this week. Some aides have criticized Kushner, saying he claimed control of the legal strategy ahead of the election but was distracted by other issues such as Middle East peace efforts.” (To which a resentful Bill Stepien replied, in an email chain circulating the Journal article, “This is BS.”)

The outsiders were speaking not to standardized political process, but to the Trump MO: always seize the opportunity for public drama. This gave you control of the narrative and, of course, gained the attention of the public. Conflict, the essence of a reality show, offered a more promising result than doing nothing.

It’s important to note: the only game any of the outsiders had was, regardless of sense and reason, to tell Donald Trump what he wanted to hear and to tell it more forcefully than the other people who were telling him what he wanted to hear.

As always, Trump had two conversations going: what people were saying to him, which he may or may not have been listening to, and what he wanted to hear, which he sought out if it was not forthcoming on its own.