Some White House aides, in trying to understand how they’d gotten here, would agree that the tale of the frog in the pot of slowly heating water might describe their situation: somehow they did not realize they were being boiled alive. But now they knew, and nearly all marked Rudy’s hair dye press conference as the moment when they could no longer, in any fashion, deny that the Cartesian world had ended.

The next day, Andrew Giuliani popped for COVID. The Rudy superspreader team was thereupon banned from Virginia headquarters, however mostly empty it was now, and forced to relocate to rooms at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, overlooking the Jefferson Memorial. The superspreader team now moved between Giuliani’s and Kerik’s suites.

Trump was pissed off. “What’s going on with this shit dripping off his face? And they’re killing Sidney in the press for what she’s saying—saying crazy shit…”

And yet, somehow, the lesson he took from this was that his people weren’t being aggressive enough. They weren’t on the offensive. He had bad lawyers. Rudy was fighting, yes … but with shit dripping down his face.

5

WHAT’S BLACK IS WHITE

The president’s estimate that they might have a 25 or 30 percent chance of prevailing—contradicting Justin Clark’s estimate that, at best, they might have little more than a 5 percent chance, itself a bow to the president’s need for the most inflated view of his situation and advantage—was now magnified exponentially by Rudy.

It was much more likely, Rudy told him (and Trump willingly believed) that the president would be able to overturn the election than that Joe Biden would be able to hold on to it. Giuliani argued that, in this conflict, Trump was the more tenacious, gifted, and brazen fighter. Here was the bedrock of Trump’s belief about himself, and Giuliani now unctuously reinforced it. This, in addition to Giuliani’s growing pile of affidavits, was the basic premise of Trump’s incredulity that anyone anywhere might think that Joe Biden was a plausible winner in a match with Donald Trump—he just simply couldn’t lose to him. That wasn’t believable!

The president, the people closest to him knew, was highly susceptible to what, for whatever reason, and against whatever logic, he wanted to believe—in other words, he frequently stood on the edge of a separate reality. The fault, therefore, lay not precisely with him but with whoever pushed him over.

The fault was Rudy’s, people closest to the president concluded.

The Trump family put it on Rudy because Rudy was crazy, or drunk, or opportunistic, or all three. Don Jr. assessed the obvious to a confidant: “Rudy isn’t capable of winning these cases.” Jared, in his particular style of disapproval, no longer mentioned Rudy or commented upon him when the subject arose. Meadows tried a more sophist approach of separating the “real” issues from the “Rudy” issues.