Among remaining aides, there was a slow-motion sense of threading the needle, of trying to meld the right thing with the tenable thing with the Trump thing. In politics, the smart move is not to say no and to know how to finesse yes. Miller proposed a press conference to lay out, state by state, the strategy and the multiple (however remote) paths to victory. They would hold it at RNC headquarters, to help suggest that this was a partywide effort.

Rudy and Andrew Giuliani and Ellis, Kerik, Toensing, diGenova, Epshteyn, Miller, and the rest of the Giuliani entourage gathered in an RNC conference room beforehand—one where the air-conditioning was blasting in late November. Around the conference table, Rudy, shivering, suddenly announced that he had asked Sidney Powell to participate in the press conference.

Ellis tried to argue against this, saying that Powell’s conspiracy theories, to which Powell was now tying ranking Republicans, made her look completely nuts. “We’re going to own her if she speaks,” protested Ellis. “She’ll be on our team.”

“We need to lay it all out,” said Rudy. “Let’s not be afraid of the truth.”

“It’s not true,” said Ellis.

Miller reminded Giuliani that even he had recently called Powell crazy—at which point, the six-foot Powell showed up wearing a leopard-print cardigan and a leather jacket that made her look like something out of the Michael Jackson 1984 Victory Tour.

The group shortly filed out of the cold conference room and into the small room reserved for the press conference, with fifty or sixty people and the heat up high and no ventilation. Giuliani introduced what, in Ellis’s characterization of the new Trump lawyers, was being called “an elite strikeforce team”: him, Powell, Ellis, diGenova, Toensing, and Epshteyn, each vastly more familiar with a television studio than a courtroom.

In fact, Giuliani’s presentation, departing from his often more manic turns, was mostly procedural and straightforward—he was getting good at ticking off the long, long list of minor and massive state-by-state fraud claims. He stood beside a poster board with a U.S. map and the legend “Multiple Pathways to Victory.” Six states were highlighted in red: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Giuliani seemed to make an effort this time to stay focused and buttoned up … but for the heat.

Three minutes into his presentation, sweat started to bead on his forehead. Over the next fifteen minutes it sprouted on his cheeks, then on his chin. He had to take his glasses off because they were slipping. Then, thirty-two minutes in, a rivulet of black hair dye started to run down his face. Then the rivulet grew wider, tributaries of black and deathly gray. Curiously, you could not immediately see it from the in-person seats. But you could see it on television, and in seconds, Twitter lit up in wonder and incredulity. Everybody in the audience in person, agog, was pointing at their phones and then looking up and pointing at the mayor.