It was a sign of impending doom, to some, when ear

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It was a sign of impending doom , to some, when earlier this summer Parscale began coming in more often just as the target on his back swelled to carnival proportions.

The polls? Trump trailed his almost-invisible challenger by double digits nationally and by a considerable margin in most battleground states. The messaging? Well, you try to “spin” six months in which 160,000 Americans died and at least 5 million more were infected by a virus you first said wouldn’t be much to worry about. Six months in which your best case for reelection — the greatest economy in the world — was destroyed too.

The offense? Trump couldn’t even settle on a nickname for Joe Biden. Was he “Sleepy Joe,” or “Creepy Joe,” or “Beijing Biden”? That tiny Tulsa rally Parscale had organized — which followed weeks of massive hype — preceded a spike in coronavirus infections in the city that, local officials said, was probably born of the event, where the guest list included Herman Cain, who later died.

Meanwhile, nationwide, there was civil unrest that Trump, whose political career had begun with a media tour to promote a racist conspiracy theory called birtherism, was unfit to handle. Yet there was an attitude, naïve and cocky, that led Parscale to compare the campaign to the Death Star, ready to fire but with no apparent idea where to aim. What was next?

Locusts? How could the circumstances be any worse? The campaign was in a hole so deep it was actually historic — a deficit not just bigger, at this point in the race, than any an incumbent had ever overcome, but bigger than any an incumbent had ever even faced.

Even Trump was finding it more difficult to believe the fiction that everything was going great, and easier and easier to see the nihilistic wisdom of open warfare with the Postal Service in a way that might both cut Democrats’ likely vote-by-mail margins and delegitimize the election more generally.

His closest advisers were now telling him that the bad numbers and bad reviews weren’t the fruits of Fake News or a deep-state hoax but a genuine reflection of what could happen in November. Though it took some time for him to accept it. The president recently asked a second senior White House official to review Biden’s performance after watching him speak. “I said, ‘I think if we lose to this guy, we’re really pathetic,’?” the official told me. “The president said to me, ‘I’m not losing to Joe Biden.’ I said, ‘You’re losing to Joe Biden.”


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