The president, with his fine radar for who was all in and who was holding back, had already made the decision to cut out his weary, and skeptical, campaign leadership and legal team—too stiff, too slow, too by-the-book—but he was not yet desperate enough or crazy enough to put Rudy in charge.

He was choosing Dave Bossie.

Bossie was a right-wing gadfly, organizer, and attack man, a Yosemite Sam figure ever blasting at liberal rabbits, but at least a pro. In 2016, on the plane during a campaign swing, he had famously confronted Trump (the only one willing to), telling him he had to stop tweeting, insisting on this heatedly enough that many suspected this was the singular reason Bossie had been deprived of a spot in the White House, which he’d desperately wanted.

Bossie ran assorted conservative efforts and not-for-profits out of a small town house on Capitol Hill, producing films and books and other materials. One of his key accomplishments was the Citizens United lawsuit that ultimately removed all political spending restrictions on for-profit and not-for-profit companies. His other, arguably major accomplishment was Donald Trump. As far back as 2012, Bossie had been recommended to the developer and reality television star as a political advisor. Bossie had first introduced Steve Bannon to Trump. In 2015, he had recommended Corey Lewandowski, whom Trump hired as his campaign manager. More recently, Bossie and Lewandowski had been among Parscale’s main antagonists, trying to force him out. Returning at the end of the week from Arizona, where he was trying to coordinate the recount efforts, Bossie was told by Trump that he wanted him to run the overall election legal challenge.

This was another reality-inversion moment—Bossie was not even a lawyer. A willing Trump soldier and always ready to please the boss, even Bossie was confused, or appalled, by his sudden elevation.

“I don’t know if congratulations or condolences are in order,” wrote one campaign aide to him.

“I want to fucking kill myself,” Bossie replied.

The country had lived in weird and anxious limbo for something near seventy-two hours. Tuesday evening to Saturday morning may have been the greatest period of collective uncertainty (and dread, for many) since the Cuban Missile Crisis, almost sixty years before. And if, by Saturday morning, it seemed quite surely clear that Biden would win and Trump would lose, it seemed equally clear that if this were not shortly made definitive, the nation would enter an existential moment the likes of which it had never known.

But then, suddenly, during the anxious morning, it was definitive, as clearly definitive as an election can be, all traditionally reliable sources and all underlying analytics in agreement.

CNN called the election for Joe Biden at 11:24 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday, November 7.