On Saturday, November 21, two days after Giuliani’s hair dye meltdown at the RNC press conference, U.S. Court District judge Matthew Brann, in Pennsylvania, denied the Trump effort to have millions of mail-in ballots thrown out because of small inconsistencies, from county to county, in the filing process. (For instance, some counties had allowed voters to correct mistakes on their ballots where others had not.) The legal arguments, Brann said, were “without merit” and based on “speculative accusations.” The claim, “like Frankenstein’s monster, has been haphazardly stitched together.” The court had “no authority to take away the right to vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens,” Brann wrote in a model of the scoffing and incredulity that many of the decisions in the Trump election cases would express.

But, in fact, they hadn’t lost at all, according to Rudy. They had just quickened the pace to victory: “Today’s decision turns out to help us in our strategy to get expeditiously to the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Giuliani and Ellis in a statement after the Pennsylvania court smackdown.

The breadth of the legal effort needed to overturn the results in at least three states—Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona were now the favorites (after the court made it clear that the road to invalidating more than a million votes in Pennsylvania was closed)—to achieve an Electoral College majority, and to accomplish this in no more than a few weeks, would have been, even in more favorable circumstances, an improbable feat. In the week after the election, the president kept insisting that they had to do what Bush had done in Florida after the 2000 election, a matter involving a few hundred votes shifting either way. And, indeed, that effort had been a massive one in a single state with a razor-thin outcome, whereas this was three states with vastly larger vote gaps to overcome.

Who were those lawyers? Whom did Bush have? Trump demanded to know, casting about in his almost entirely impressionistic view of history and events. He kept returning to the question, leading Kushner to publicly declare that they were looking for a figure like James Baker, who had run the Bush recount effort, to run theirs—soft-pedaling to the president the ninety-year-old Baker’s disparaging public remarks about the Trump election challenge and making no real effort to find such a party eminence to lead the challenge.

Trump was back in a place where, in his career, he had often found himself: All his problems could be solved with the right lawyers; all his problems were the result of having the wrong lawyers. There were, out there, brilliant, canny, cunning, hugger-mugger lawyers who could fix any problems, and then there were his own flat-footed, unimaginative, wimpy, and exhausted ones.

In this sense, he was correct. Both the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department had turned their backs on his electoral quest. No lawyer with normal career prospects, it seemed, would go there.