He grilled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, and Kushner and Meadows, during the days after the election on his support in foreign capitals. After November 7, and the calls by the networks for Biden, the four men each tried to prepare him for what was characterized by Meadows as “diplomatic tightrope walking.” Foreign leaders might be forced to make ritual bows to Biden’s election.

This was hardly the case. Across the world, there was, with detectable relief, a public embrace of the Biden victory by all but the most retro regimes (notably, Russia and Brazil).

It was startling to aides, however much they were anticipating an eruption, that Trump’s wrath fell on Bibi Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister’s reach out to Biden (some twelve hours after the U.S. networks called the election, arguably a begrudging reach out) coming even before, Trump now repeated, “the ink was dry,” was an ultimate betrayal.

As in all Trump reactions, a variety of grievances welled up here. There was his belief that he had singularly done more for Israel than any American president—and that therefore he was owed. And now sold out. Trump also conflated this with his own increasing anger at his failure to much improve his standing among Jewish voters, even with what he regarded as the quid pro quo nature of his support of Israel.

At the same time, aides were bringing him any indication possible from other leaders that their congratulations for Biden were lukewarm. He was assured, the European leaders, along with Putin in Russia and Bolsonaro in Brazil, were sending messages of support. Such “messages” mostly seemed however to be in the form of politic ambassadorial conversation and polite well-wishing. But this became a further part of his foundational belief: Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron and Mario Draghi, each of whom he’d had difficult issues with in the past—a segue here, as always, into his complaints about them not paying their fair share of NATO—were very supportive of his election challenge. Their countries ran much more secure elections than ours. And Boris Johnson in the U.K. was looking at some of the exact same problems we were having here. Months later he would yet be convinced leaders of the Western world and U.S. allies—save for Bibi—had stood with him.

Kicking the can down the road involved extending the effective deadlines for the race. You had to move the election from being a snapshot in time—musical chairs when the music suddenly stops—to being a moving target and an ongoing campaign. If the campaign before the election was about who should win, the campaign after, redefining basic terms, was about who had won. For Trump, the conflict, like all conflicts, should just continue, with the winner being who could stay in the fight the longest.

Trump, again with his wholly impressionistic historical recall, had become taken with the idea that his was one in a long line of stolen elections—he was just willing to stand up for himself, unlike the others.