The conversation among the fifteen people in the room—some participating, some there for no reason that Rove could fathom—continued for an hour. Should they attack Biden and run the risk of Cuomo? Should they let Biden alone until it was too late for the Dems to replace him? But how strong might he become without being challenged in his basement? And wouldn’t Michelle Obama certainly spell doom for them? What was to be done?

“My God, where did he get this from?” Rove asked Parscale as he was being shown out.

“Sean Hannity.”

“Sean Hannity?” Rove repeated, incredulous that the Fox News anchorman, with his extravagant conspiracy theories, was dictating the course of a presidential campaign.

“POTUS believes it,” said a helpless Parscale. “If you could call Hannity and tell him to let up, that might be good.”

The campaign was a distilled reflection of the president’s indecision, resentments, disorganization, constant sense of victimhood, plus the last thing that anyone had said to him—and, as well, his son-in-law’s sagacious and self-protecting judgment not to challenge him on any of this. But right now the imploding campaign was all being blamed on Bradley Parscale, the website developer from San Antonio, Texas, who had risen from “digital guy” in 2016 to become Kushner’s and the Trump children’s handpicked campaign manager and who proudly called the billion-dollar Trump political enterprise the Death Star—an odd choice of metaphor because rebel forces in Star Wars were able to fly in and destroy the superstructure.

A crowd gathered in the Oval for a cover-your-ass meeting on July 13, with the on-the-verge-of-ripshit president behind the Resolute desk autographing pictures as he surveyed the room. The official purpose of the meeting was to assign blame for the fact that the Republican nominating convention was a month out and a looming catastrophe. Having been forced to move the convention from Charlotte, North Carolina—effectively run out of town by the city fathers because of COVID fears—the Trump campaign now had no plans for the new location, in Jacksonville, Florida. The program manager in Charlotte—already paid!—had simply walked away. There was no finalized venue in Jacksonville, no program, no program manager, no speeches written, no speakers locked in, and almost no money because the RNC had already committed to contracts in Charlotte.

The disarray was in fact largely a product of the president’s own continuing reluctance to give up on the idea of a mass convention blowout, the ultimate Trump event. But now the blame fell on everyone else.

“I thought you were doing this?” a despairing Parscale had said days earlier to the RNC’s McDaniel, who was here in the Oval to defend herself.

“Planning the convention? Excuse me. That’s your job.”