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.

Even before this, Trump had come to the breaking point with the Counsel’s Office and the Department of Justice, frequently talking before the election of his post-victory plans to replace both Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Bill Barr, the attorney general.

Cipollone, a devout Catholic and pro-life lawyer, had first come to Trump’s attention in 2016, when the conservative radio and television host Laura Ingraham brought him as her uninvited plus-one to a debate-prep session. A dead ringer for Milhouse Van Houten, from The Simpsons, Cipollone replaced—in fact, was one of the few people willing to replace—Don McGahn, the then White House counsel, whom Trump had come to despise. And shortly, he would come to despise Cipollone, too.

In one midsummer encounter, as protests raged in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Portland, and other cities, and with the president watching Fox’s coverage of the rioting on an endless loop, Trump summoned Cipollone to the Oval Office, launching on him as soon as the out-of-breath lawyer (running down from his second-floor office) got to the doorway.

“So, Pat, what have you been doing all day? Like, just tell me, what time did you get in? Filing any lawsuits against Antifa?” His diatribes against Cipollone were traded both as cautionary tales—it could get that bad for anyone, if they weren’t careful—and models of the Trump insult oeuvre.

Barr, too, who had distinguished himself beyond any attorney general in recent history as the president’s accommodating water carrier and whose intervention had arguably saved Trump’s presidency after the Mueller investigation—reading the special counsel’s damning report in the most fulsome way; indeed, reversing its thesis for public consumption—now was the target of a withering attack.