While it might be required for many to still show up for work—and COVID made it all the easier not to show up—it would not be the same, not with the same hopes, not for the same purpose. Everybody understood the nature of political defeat. That was the other reason to take a day, to recompose, to come up with a new bearing and attitude with which to face what had to be done, to be a team player and all, but to understand that the game was over.

That Sunday, Dave Bossie, newly in charge of the election challenge, came down with COVID.

“Really?” some of the team needled him. Given that the Saturday call by the networks and the Associated Press had made a Biden victory a certainty, and any challenge to it largely chimerical, there was no small amount of speculation on the part of remaining campaign staffers that Bossie’s diagnosis was a convenient one. “How did you get so lucky?” noted one.

“Fuck you,” replied Bossie.

With Bossie down and Meadows having fallen a few days before, COVID as pressing a threat to the Trump White House as defeat, this meant nobody was leading one of the most ambitious challenges to a presidential election in American history except the president himself.

While the White House was filled with Trumpers who were more Trump-like as the years went on and as the less-Trump-like washed out, no one, with the possible exception of Rudy Giuliani, was as Trump-like as Trump. That, in itself, was a unique characteristic of this White House: that the president himself represented the most extreme and purest impulses of his administration, unmindful of political consequences.

Even Bossie and Meadows, politically intemperate in their own ways, were yet careerists cognizant of the longer game; if they could help it, they were not going to self-immolate. Both men, along with everybody else in Trump’s inner circle, understood what was going to happen: Trump would depart the presidency on January 20. They were counting on the dudgeon and posturing to wind down as the president found his own path to rationalizing and accepting his defeat.

Kushner, contained to the point of inscrutability—never breaking character—was absent more than he was present. The election had established his deadline for completing the set of Middle East peace deals that he had begun and that he saw as the administration’s, or his own, lasting monument. But in a world where the obvious could not necessarily be spoken, the meaning of his absence from the West Wing was clear. In some sense, it was even an optimistic sign: while the president might not grasp reality, the people closest to him did.