On November 25, the day before Thanksgiving, a legislative hearing was scheduled in Pennsylvania. Of the outstanding states, Pennsylvania represented the lion’s share of votes. The Pennsylvania numbers had been particularly bedeviling for the president. Pennsylvania, a surprise win for Trump in 2016, was going to give him his 2020 victory, but this was where, hour by hour, he saw victory slipping away. It had become fixed in the president’s mind that he had been ahead by a million votes, a landslide in Pennsylvania, and that then, somehow … somehow those votes had disappeared. Just disappeared.

What Rudy had managed to put together was a “field hearing”—far from anything like a real hearing, one that state reps might actually participate in or listen to. It wasn’t even in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital. It was in Gettysburg. But this was going to be the culminating hearing of the road trip. Giuliani and Ellis would close out the campaign before the Thanksgiving holiday. Trump announced that he would be there in person. He had not been out since the election and was pressing for a rally with the belief that there was popular sentiment to be roused that, despite all votes being counted, could still influence the outcome.

“The people haven’t yet spoken,” he took to saying, as though oblivious to the election that had in fact just taken place.

Meadows and Kushner, viewing the hearing as a hopelessly smalltime affair, hardly worthy of a presidential last stand, convinced Trump he ought not attend. Instead, he dialed in, and Jenna Ellis held up her cell phone to the mic as the cameras rolled so the president could broadcast his stolen-election pitch.

It wasn’t just Republican state legislatures that were not getting it; Rudy and Jenna and, indeed, the president were fighting the Republican establishment, too. During a dinner in DC with the mayor and Bernie, Jenna got an email forwarding a note from Justin Riemer, the chief counsel for the RNC. Why, Riemer wondered, writing to RNC colleagues, were they supporting this Trump election nonsense? The RNC raised a lot more money fighting Democrats than it did fighting elections.

Now Jenna had Riemer’s email. She passed her phone around the table, everybody stunned at the message.

“Can you fucking believe this?” said the mayor, as though holding something like a smoking gun in his hand. “They are backdooring us … doing everything in their power not to help us.”

This was, said Kerik, like saying, “Fuck Trump, fuck Giuliani.”

The mayor, sitting in the restaurant but in full battle mode (and with a few drinks in him), damn well got Riemer himself on the phone: “Who the fuck do you think you are? How can you be going against the president?… You need to resign and resign tonight … because you are going to get fired.”

And the mayor called the RNC chair, McDaniel, to make sure this happened.

Riemer remains the RNC chief counsel.