This was now the pattern: pay no attention to lost lawsuits and just file new ones. Indeed, part of the grand circular point here was that the president’s confidence was maintained by local lawyers and politicians eager to curry his favor by jumping into the election fight without regard for the ultimate outcome of these battles. They all might have been far from convinced that there could be any positive outcome, but they were nevertheless ever willing to please Trump—and possibly to get on television in the process—which, in turn, fortified his certainty and confidence.

What was in Trump’s mind? And who knew what was in Trump’s mind?

There were people in the Trump circle who had achieved respect and standing because they had come to have fine antennae for how the president might react; they got his animal instincts. But there was no one, literally no one, who would have claimed they had any substantial insight into what Trump was thinking and feeling.

The president’s reactions and his behavior were so at odds with what was recognizable or what could be accounted for—his issues with factual accuracy were as confounding to people around him as they were appalling to the liberal press—that it became logically necessary to accord him a kind of Martian status. He was simply not like anyone else. In insider political circles, almost all politicians are seen as difficult and even damaged people, necessarily tolerated in some civics class inversion because they were elected. So, Trump was compared to the most outsized of them, but he still came out stranger and more difficult and more damaged. (There was much speculation about his mother, whom he almost never mentioned, unlike his father, who was his recurring example of cutthroat accomplishment.) Or he was compared to billionaires, men who, well beyond what a politician could do, absolutely and capriciously controlled their own environments and how the world was allowed to interact with them. There was a running commentary about who might be more difficult, Trump or Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire and leading Trump contributor who, even in Republican circles, had achieved a fabled monster status.

The question that was asked since the beginning of the administration but that became even more urgent as Trump’s single-minded and senseless election challenge progressed was: Why would anyone tolerate this? The answer was simply that, in 2016, he had been elected, no matter how loopy and unexpected that was, and this was the nature of politics: you bowed to the winner. (In fact, already some of that tolerance was seeping out because of the stark reality that he had not been reelected.) But the other answer was that, in politics, there was a whole professional class whose essential skill sets involved dealing with maximally difficult and damaged bosses. You took it and put up with it and tried to make the best of it, not in spite of everything, but because this is what you did; this was the job you had. And the more you could tolerate or accept or rationalize, the better you were at it and the higher you would rise in the universe, the brutalized universe, of power.