The White House became a strange ghost town in the days after the election. Trump's schedule — already unstructured — became more so. It was impossible to shift his focus from his grievances about the election to important policy matters. In conversations in the Oval Office, Trump would occasionally slip and seem to acknowledge he lost, saying, "Can you believe I lost to that fucking guy? That fucking corpse?"

Most in the West Wing, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, understood that Trump had lost. But nobody confronted him directly with that unpleasant news. Instead many on the staff chose to avoid him.

or weeks, Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory on election night — even if he lost. But the real-time results, punctuated by ox’s shocking call, upended his plans and began his unraveling.

Trump had planned for Americans to go to bed on Nov. 3 celebrating — or resigned to — his re-election. The maps they saw on TV should be bathed in red. But at 11:20 p.m. that vision fell apart, as the nation’s leading news channel among conservatives became the first outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden. Inside the White House, Trump's inner circle erupted in horror.

Over the next two months, Trump took the nation down with him as he descended into denial, despair and a reckless revenge streak that fueled a deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol by his backers seeking to overturn the election. This triggered a constitutional crisis and a bipartisan push to impeach Trump on his way out the door, to try to cast him out of American politics for good.

But in four years, Trump had remade the Republican Party in his own image, inspiring and activating tens of millions of Americans who weren’t abandoning him anytime soon. He’d once bragged he could shoot another person on ifth Avenue and not lose his voters. In reality, many of them had eagerly lined up to commit violence on his behalf.