But now he had given up on any interest or pretense in executive matters. The election challenge, this very issue of his survival, had made everything else meaningless. All daily briefings were canceled, including national security briefings. All efforts to return his attention to pandemic issues, vaccine rollout, or critical intelligence failed. And there was, quite categorically, no possibility of engaging him in, or even discussing with him, transition matters. What’s more, he had cut off all communication with the Senate leadership.

At this point, it was Meadows effectively assuming all executive functions—or at least those that could be carried on in secret and not generate a headline that might alert the president that some business continued as usual. Virtually on his own, Meadows commenced the formal transition to the Biden administration. This included intelligence briefings, which Trump had stalled, Department of Defense transition meetings, which the president had rejected, opening a daily channel to key Biden aides, and integrating the Biden team into the White House’s daily COVID planning and strategy meetings.

A hobbled government was able to work under the nose of a wholly preoccupied president, but with almost everyone in the government looking into the void of what might happen in the event of a crisis. Never before, it seemed to many, had a sitting president so abdicated his proscribed and daily duties and so turned from the most critical issues of the moment.

Instead, he dwelled exclusively—shutting all else out—on the “Steal,” his hard 6 p.m. Oval Office quit schedule now often running late into the night with time for almost anybody who would feed his “Steal” obsession.

As much as Trump was busy raging at and casting out anyone who doubted that this was the most massive and systematic election fraud in U.S. history, he was eager to embrace anyone who was on board with it. If you weren’t with him, you were against him. But if you were with him, then all was forgiven.

Few people in the Trump pantheon had so thoroughly estranged themselves from the president as Steve Bannon, the 2016 campaign CEO and top advisor in the early months of the administration. Bannon had crossed Trump’s family, leaked voluminously about West Wing struggles, and in very public and not-so-private venues, conducted a riotously entertaining monologue about Trump and his family’s stupidity, avarice, incompetence, and corruption. A not small amount of the details of the four-year-negative narrative about Trump were supplied to the news media by Bannon.

But Bannon, for his own semi-ironic and nakedly opportunist reasons, had been trying to find his way back into Trumpworld. During the impeachment, now almost a year ago, Bannon, along with Jason Miller and Raheem Kassam, a Bannon acolyte and British right-winger, had launched a podcast to defend the president. In Bannon’s telling, the president’s fate had then actually hung precariously in the balance, with the podcast becoming a rallying place for Trump support.