Trump was lashing out even more directly to the White House Counsel’s Office—whose lawyers he certainly considered to be his personal lawyers—instructing them to call Barr and find out what the fuck he was doing. What about the machines? Impound the machines! Investigate the machines! Go after the people behind the machines! And he began to suggest that it was the attorney general—“my attorney general”—who was the impediment to his election challenge.

Then Barr gave his December 1 interview to the Associated Press.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

And Barr twisted the knife over the machines.

“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and, so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”

Trump was livid. There was no warning that the interview was even coming. It was, in Trump’s eyes, not just insubordination, but insurrection. And in a sense Trump was right: the Barr statement, a radical reversal from his long Trump tolerance, was hardly anything less than a declaration that the president (and Rudy and the others in the clown car) were pushing fictional tales and nonsensical hysterics.

Trump demanded Barr’s head. “This is bullshit. No fraud? Has he just been sitting over there doing absolutely fucking nothing for a month? We have to get rid of Barr. There’s no coming back from this. Who can we put in there?” Trump asked. Meadows, Cipollone, Herschmann, Kushner—all got the rant.

For days and days this remained an obsessional fixation. He talked about it continuously, blamed everyone for somehow not preventing it, and transformed, in the telling, the otherwise dutiful Barr into one of the most disloyal members of his administration. Months later he would still be talking about this betrayal.

Trying to avoid a public firing—or, worse, resignation—the White House aides enlisted Giuliani and Ellis to provide the official pushback. But Barr’s end was written, and in a race to beat Trump’s determination to fire and humiliate him in his last month in office, Barr’s resignation would come two weeks later.

But who was running the country?

Even in more normal times this question would not have had a straightforward answer. As a manager, Trump’s own interests superseded almost everything else. Therefore, he was often pursuing a series of personal concerns, vendettas, fancies, most often figments of the moment, while the executive branch itself carried on its business. The job of aides was to snatch or negotiate time with him, or decisions from him, on pressing executive functions while he pursued his other concerns—and to do this during his 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule in the office.