Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani was holding a press conference in Philadelphia. If the inner circled struggled to keep Giuliani away from the president, they worked just as hard to keep him away from the cameras.

Trump seemed to have understood what Rudy was up to, tweeting it out that morning. But few others in the immediate Trump orbit seemed to grasp much about what Rudy was doing. They were just grateful he wasn’t in Washington.

What Rudy was apparently doing, without any clear structure in the election-challenge operation, was staking his claim to it: doing this as he had done during the “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” scandal in 2016 and during the Mueller investigation in 2018. If you defended the president hotly enough, especially if you were the only person defending him, then you were in with him. It was another critical theme of Trumpworld: The people who were in charge were the people who took charge. It was an anarchic, even Lord of the Flies org chart. (And, as Meadows would note to people, just because the president might say you are in charge doesn’t mean he’s really put you in charge.)

The press conference in Philadelphia was organized mostly by Giuliani’s team—or lack of a team. And, indeed, because they did not have a team, they blamed the organization, or lack of organization, on the campaign team’s refusing to assist them and its undermining them in malicious ways. Hence, in comic or absurd confusion, the occasion morphed from, theoretically, the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Philly to a strip mall business called Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a … well, landscaping business, soon to enter history, on the edge of an interstate and across from an adult bookstore, in its parking lot.

This was in every sense a Rudy affair: chaotic, disorganized, scattered in result and purpose, and not unlikely conceived and executed with its key actor a few sheets to the wind. But Rudy, despite his own befuddlement and every attempt by others to sidetrack him, pushed through, however ludicrously, to the end. With his retinue behind him (including Bernie Kerik, the disgraced former New York City police commissioner whose presidential pardon Giuliani had previously arranged), Rudy set out to take over the Trump election fight:

“So, I’m here on behalf of the Trump campaign. I am an attorney for the president,” he said, introducing himself to this sudden and unlikely gathering of the international press and, at the same time, trying to bring the microphone down to his ever-shrinking stature.