The Trump campaign staff had been anticipating a call, hoping it might not yet come, but also understanding that, its having come, the election and reasonable efforts to challenge it or even forestall it were over.

It was done.

NBC, CBS, ABC, and the Associated Press—everybody who had been holding back until the others moved shortly followed. Fox came in at 11:40 a.m.

Almost immediately, people everywhere poured into the street, the week’s tension broken in an instant. Within moments of the call’s being made, the area around the White House (now called Black Lives Matter Plaza) was filled with spontaneous revelers. In surrounding blocks, people banged pots and pans and maniacally tooted car horns, the evening COVID lockdown ritual now redeployed against the Trump election virus. The greater White House area from Fifteenth Street to Seventeenth Street and from K Street to Constitutional Avenue was enveloped in sudden and joyful gridlock.

In every Democratic city across the nation—that is, basically, every city—and liberal burg, from cappuccinos in the streets of Santa Monica to cocktails on the lawns of the Hamptons, it was a vast national (or, at least, anti-Trumpers) celebration.

It was an unseasonably warm day, and Trump, as it happened, was at his golf club in Virginia, where both Trumpers and anti-Trumpers shortly gathered at the door to heckle one another.

A group had slowly been assembling in the Rosslyn HQ all morning. Everybody was there largely to wait for the network call, although with no one quite acknowledging that that’s what they were doing there; that this was a deathwatch. It was nearly the full brain trust: Kushner, Hicks, Stepien, Clark, Morgan, Miller, Herschmann, and Bossie.

Everybody, as though more out of inertia than plan, found themselves together in the conference room. Kushner and Hicks began trying to force an answer to the question they all already knew, but that nobody seemed yet willing to say.

“Is there any way you guys see us getting over the top?” asked Kushner, knowing of course that there wasn’t, but officially still hanging on to the Trumpworld sense of elasticity, or fight, or magical thinking.

But even with the results as certain as they could be, the campaign found itself not wanting to say no, even though it could surely not say yes.

There were outstanding legal challenges. There were instances of fraud. There were questions.

But … could those issues, even assuming they were decided in the Trump campaign’s favor, push them over the top?

Not really. No.

It was Hicks who again tried, with some determination, to move things forward. They had two and half months left to accomplish things and to remind people of what they had already accomplished.

Kushner, keeping himself out of the line of fire, then sent Stepien, Clark, Miller, and Herschmann, along with Bossie, to deliver the status report to the president—in effect, although it was not exactly framed this way, the final report.