But . . . what if he lost? A man who grounds his very identity on winning has strategies for handling loss. For years, Trump had been laying out his. If the votes did not add up to victory, there was a reason. An obvious one. Everybody could see it. He had spelled it out again and again, warning even before his shocking victory in 2016 that the system was “totally rigged.”

Rigged by whom? Trump’s promise to “Drain the Swamp” was a sure applause line at his rallies. The expression long predated him, of course, referring to the nefarious ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, but Trump’s usage implied something more and kept enlarging. In time it became simply “The Swamp,” a thing he never clearly defined but that eventually seemed to encompass every entrenched institution in America. There was the “Deep State,” the career employees who made up the enduring machinery of government; the Democrat Party, stem and branch; unprincipled “career” politicians; the “lying” mainstream press; the technocrats who created and controlled the very internet platforms he and his supporters used; the Republicans who dared to criticize him; liberal academia . . . on and on the meaning expanded. Left-leaning and corrupt, The Swamp was an unyielding suck on Trump’s native genius, determined to drag him down, and with him the American dream.

Campaigning against Hillary Clinton, he had predicted “large-scale voter fraud” and had decried the American electoral process as fundamentally unfair. He forecast a sweeping crime capable of changing the nation’s course but was always vague about how it would actually work. Indeed, despite his claim that everybody knew it, there was no evidence of it in modern times. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that tabulated voting fraud cases nationwide going back more than thirty years, listed only widely scattered instances committed by members of both political parties, capable of influencing—and even then only in rare instances—local election results. But the charge resonated with those who feared big government, the growing number and power of minorities, the whole modern drift of American society. Drawing on antiquated stereotypes from the era of Tammany Hall, Trump especially stressed corruption in big cities, where Democrats ruled and the population was heavy with African Americans.

“They even want to try and rig the election at the polling booths, where so many cities are corrupt. And you see that,” he said, campaigning in Colorado in 2016. “And voter fraud is all too common. And then they criticize us for saying that. . . . Take a look at Philadelphia . . . take a look at Chicago, take a look at Saint Louis. Take a look at some of these cities where you see things happening that are horrendous.” In his final debate with Clinton, he had refused to say whether, in the event he lost, he would even acknowledge the results. In that event, the numbers would be crooked.

Even victory did not allay this gripe. He continued to throw shade on the contest, questioning the validity of Clinton’s winning margin in the popular vote, eventually setting up a commission to investigate voter fraud. Asked whether Clinton’s certified numbers were accurate, the commission chief, Kris Kobach, said, “We may never know the answer to that.” Even after the probe found nothing and disbanded, Trump continued grooming his supporters to expect fraud.

Throughout his White House tenure, he used his elevated platform to spread this message. In November 2018, prior to midterms, Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, warned of wide-scale voter fraud. They offered no evidence. Trump said, “Just take a look. All you have to do is go around, take a look at what’s happened over the years, and you’ll see. There are a lot of people—a lot of people—my opinion and based on proof—that try and get in illegally and actually vote illegally. So we just want to let them know that there will be prosecutions at the highest level.” As ballots were still being counted in Florida’s races for governor and US Senate, Trump claimed on Twitter, “Many ballots are missing or forged, ballots massively infected.” No evidence of this surfaced, no one was prosecuted, and both Republican candidates ultimately won.

Still he continued impugning the voting process. The move to allow more mail voting during the pandemic gave him a new target. “Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re [Democrats] cheaters,” he said at a coronavirus press briefing on April 7, 2020. “They go and collect them. They’re fraudulent in many cases. . . . You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place.” Pressed the next day about the “thousands and thousands” claim, Trump promised to provide evidence, and did not. There wasn’t any. He wasn’t making a case; he was sowing suspicion.

For months, within the walls of the State Farm Arena, water had risen in a pipe that led to the bathroom in the Chick-fil-A Fan Zone on the upper level. The arena’s maintenance staff had shut off the water on that level during the coronavirus pandemic, since crowds couldn’t come watch the ice skating shows or listen to Harry Styles sing. But thanks to a valve not quite shut or an O-ring worn by time, water in the pipe inched upward. Sometime in early November, it topped a curved trap and began filling the basin of the urinal, a Toto Commercial model in Cotton porcelain.

Now it spilled into the world, pouring onto the floor, seeking the lowest point in concrete worn smooth by ten thousand pairs of sneakers. It seeped into crevices, into the arena’s structure and interstitial spaces, down through the wires and ductwork, and finally collected and poured through the ceiling of the room below.

About five thirty in the morning, a few blocks away at the county’s election headquarters, Rick Barron’s phone rang and chirped with the bad news. He was director of Fulton County’s elections, and stood surrounded by banks of phones and televisions. Workers back at the arena should have started sorting early ballots, but now calls and text messages said they hadn’t. When the first workers arrived, in the dark and quiet, they’d heard the impossible sound of what seemed like indoor rain. Someone flipped on the lights and the workers found themselves standing on the edge of a storm.

Now Barron watched a video of the indoor flood. The image showed a vast room, with an array of ballot-processing machinery, tables where the workers normally sat, and big plastic bins full of ballots. Two of the workers always made an impression, even in grainy arena security footage. Ruby Freeman stood out with an Afro that matched her big personality. In normal times she ran a kiosk at the mall selling handbags, socks, and other ladies’ accessories, which she called Lady Ruby’s Unique Treasures. But during election season she helped out with temporary work. Her daughter, thirty-six-year-old Shaye Moss, wore her hair in recognizable long blond braids, and had worked for years for the Fulton County elections office. Doing election work meant early mornings and long hours but it gave the mother and daughter a close-up view of democracy in action, right in the room where ballots were gathered, sorted, and counted. But now this—water pouring from above—had brought the machinery of freedom to a stop.

Behind his pandemic mask, Barron sighed. He would hear about this from higher-ups at the state level, which was the last thing he needed. He already didn’t fit in here; he was the only white member of his election staff, to start. And the Atlanta political class found him odd. He was from Oregon, for one thing. At that moment, he wore a lanyard emblazoned with the logo for the Portland soccer team, of all things. He might as well drink Pepsi.

Now a rain cloud had burst, somehow, in his counting room.

Bonkers, he thought. He showed the video to Johnny Kauffman, an Atlanta radio reporter who had covered local elections for years and had embedded with the Fulton County staff. It seemed funny, in a bleak way. “Oh my God,” Kauffman told him. “It looks like it’s raining from the ceiling.”

“It could only happen to us,” one of the election staffers said. What could Barron do but laugh?

He didn’t know he stood on a historic precipice; soon he would realize that in this election, any detail, no matter how small, could be manipulated. And any event, however mundane, could be contorted into conspiracy.

The downpour in the Atlanta arena turned out to be a brief squall. The arena’s maintenance crew found the source, fixed the urinal, and sopped up the mess. No ballots got wet; no equipment damaged. Shortly after eight, when the polls opened, the counting resumed.

Barron thought, No big deal.

The year before, Hoopes had been elected a Republican committeewoman in Bethel, in Delaware County, or Delco, as natives prefer, a sprawling suburb that stretches west and south of Philadelphia. Soon to be given a measure of fame by the fictional HBO series Mare of Easttown, it was home to more than half a million people, of whom only 9,500 lived in Bethel. The county contains disparate worlds, stretching from the city’s swanky, storied Main Line suburbs to the densely packed rows of blue-collar townhouses of Upper Darby. Bethel lay twenty-six miles southwest of Philadelphia at the Delaware border. The county was one of those traditionally red suburbs that in recent years began turning blue. In 2020, Delco had sworn in a Democratic majority on its governing council for the first time in a century and a half. But along the leafy curved lanes of Hoopes’s precinct, the vote still leaned Republican.

Hoopes is a slight and very energetic woman of early middle age, big-eyed, occasionally blond, cheerfully social—she loved a stiff drink— and fiercely opinionated. Trump had won only 37.4 percent of the vote in Delco four years earlier, but he had narrowly edged Hillary Clinton in Bethel. Two hundred and ninety-one votes had made the difference. Ever since, as best she could, Hoopes had rallied the Trump troops, mostly through pungent and frequent Facebook postings. She maintained two accounts, one featuring her face superimposed on an old tourist ad of a woman in a polka-dot spring dress with a red carnation in her hair, inside the slogan “Everyone Is Welcome on the Trump Train,” and the other with her in a Rosie the Riveter pose, with her hair tied in a red polka-dot kerchief, flexing her bicep over a “Trump-Pence” banner. Each had a following in the hundreds. She posted multiple times on most days, about, among other things, gun rights, the glory of God and America, Democratic perfidy, the necessity of cracking down hard on the leftist antifascist group called Antifa, and lately, vehemently, against all public health efforts to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, which she regarded as less threatening than the seasonal flu. For Hoopes, masks, vaccinations, and shutdowns were needless, and to the extent they were mandated or encouraged by government, liberal tyranny. When the statistics she posted to support her arguments were labeled false by Facebook, it just underscored her point. Mark Zuckerberg and the other social media titans, along with the mainstream liberal media and Democratic leaders, were out to push a liberal agenda, to stop Trump, and strangle freedom. Hoopes fought back with outrage and sarcasm. She was a cheerful and outspoken warrior, telling it like it was to anyone who would listen.

The term she self-applied was “patriot,” by which she meant something much more than showing the flag on Independence Day. And it wasn’t just a matter of degree. Her use of the word signified allegiance to a particular idea of America, one in tune with God, with the nation’s commonsense core—as these patriots saw it—where men were men and women were women, where justice meant protecting hearth and home and cherished values, where the heroic stories of American greatness learned in elementary school remained true, where folks lived and earned and thrived free of meddling government or so-called experts, where the old usually trumped the new, where gut feelings counted for more than science, where good people were free to carry guns to protect themselves from bad people, where America was respected worldwide and its power feared. As used more widely, the definition was loose by design and wasn’t always coherent. There were “patriots” who deplored racism and those who were white supremacists. There were those who both embraced America’s immigrant traditions but also wanted to build a wall to keep foreigners out. Some wanted to remove the United States from foreign entanglements but also wanted it to flex its muscles more aggressively overseas. The tent was wide. It included Christian fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists and ordinary God-fearing, gun-toting wives and mothers like Leah Hoopes. But all shared a conviction that the America they revered lay under siege. The “patriot” stood armed and ready at a conceptual Bunker Hill, holding the line against the erosion of faith and decency, against big government, multiculturalization, affirmativ...