On Monday morning, Bill Stepien, who himself had been scarce since Election Day and who would shortly be almost entirely absent from the scene, called a staff-wide meeting at the campaign offices in Rosslyn. The staff was to be paid until the fifteenth of the month. Ordinarily, this would have been a time either of celebration and jockeying for new positions if it was a winning campaign, or for good-byes and getting out your résumé if it was a losing one. But now the president wanted the campaign, in its remaining days, to continue with full intensity. Stepien had to send a tricky message, mediating the demands of both the President and reality. He said to the gathering, with some awkward hesitation, well, yes, it was a hard road, but there was still a pathway to victory, however limited, and what’s more, important principles were at stake, and that he knew everyone would be professional and continue to give it their all. He hoped he was getting through but couldn’t quite be sure. It was an especially young and green staff. Here was another Trumpworld theme: a lack of political sense and sensitivity. Not long after he took over the campaign, Stepien, in a staffwide meeting, had asked for a show of hands of those who had worked on a presidential campaign before; fewer than a quarter had. So, like the president himself, the young staff might not truly appreciate the very arbitrary nature of campaigns, that they ended, and that what Stepien was actually saying was: it’s over.

For the other senior advisors, still healthy and still determined not to abandon the president in these final weeks (some combination of professionalism, loyalty, and concern holding them in place), this sense of finality—they all did know that they would be moving on—came with a further sense beyond dutifully working to the last day: they were witnesses. Sometimes guiltily and sometimes helplessly, they were seeing things never before seen in politics, even if they saw themselves as also trying to help restrain those things. They could not look away.

The persistent effort of Trump’s closest aides, lawyers, and high appointees to keep Rudy Giuliani out of the White House and far from the president had once again failed.

Trump wanted to be right about everything and to be advised that he could do anything he wanted to do, and everyone, to a man and woman, knew that their first priority as a Trump staffer was to impede or distract him from this tendency. But Giuliani, willing to tell Trump not only that he could do whatever he wanted to do, but that he could go beyond this, offered Trump vastly more power, right, and discretion than even Trump himself thought possible.