These were the questions, all without answers, exchanged by the dwindling group that saw itself as the steadiest of the president’s advisors: Mark Meadows, Justin Clark, campaign lawyer Alex Cannon, Jason Miller, Dan Scavino, and Eric Herschmann. To ask the questions was to understand that there was no structure to direct or support any aspect of the election challenge. To ask the questions was to draw a line between the professionals with some management sense and discipline and the whirling mass of end-runs and Trump’s own defiance, dictates, and free association that had now replaced them.

The list of those who had checked out now included Kushner, focused, as though in a parallel universe, on his Middle East negotiations and, in the obvious view of all, his valedictory reputation; Ivanka, focused on relocating her family to Florida; Hope Hicks, unseen since mid-November; Bill Stepien, all but formally out of the office; Derek Lyons, staff secretary (a central palace guard), gone; Alyssa Farah, communications director, out of the White House and quite openly interviewing for television jobs; Kayleigh McEnany, the press secretary, home in Florida and appearing almost nightly on the Sean Hannity show; Stephanie Grisham, the First Lady’s chief of staff and former White House comms director, nowhere to be seen.

Morgan and Clark, in part to protect their own legal reputations and in part because this was a fool’s errand, had stepped away from any role in the ongoing cases, except for one. Morgan had been left in charge of the purse strings. Even in the midst of the biggest legal fight of his life, certainly an uphill one, Trump maintained his most consistent view: lawyers were always ripping him off. As Giuliani encouraged a legal free-for-all and tried to recruit law firms to support his own team’s lack of legal depth and talent, and as local law firms saw a potential payday, Morgan was left, often countering Giuliani’s promises, to uphold the Trump principle of paying lawyers as little as possible, if at all.

The organizational aspect of the national effort to overturn the election was, in the kindest description, decentralized—that is, whoever seized it in disputed counties and precincts, invariably lawyers looking for fees or television time, owned it.

Pennsylvania lawyer Marc Scaringi, an eager local conservative talk radio host and columnist in Harrisburg, practicing family, criminal, estate, and probate law (but very much not election law), had jumped the gun and declared Trump defeated after the election. But he’d then reversed himself and joined the Pennsylvania lawsuit in its final hours, becoming the poster lawyer for local defenders, a made-for-Saturday Night Live figure willing to say or do anything without fear of humiliation.