Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win. * KK In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can’t win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign. The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser. He was equally convinced that the Clinton people were brilliant winners—“They’ve got the best and we’ve got the worst,” he frequently said. Time spent with Trump on the campaign plane was often an epic dissing experience: everybody around him was an idiot. Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first more or less official campaign manager, was often berated by the candidate. For months Trump called him “the worst,” and in June 2016 he was finally fired. Ever after, Trump proclaimed his campaign doomed without Lewandowski. “We’re all losers,” he would say. “All our guys are terrible, nobody knows what they’re doing... . Wish Corey was back.” Trump quickly soured on his second campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as well. By August, trailing Clinton by 12 to 17 points and facing a daily firestorm of eviscerating press, Trump couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. At this dire moment, Trump in some essential sense sold his losing campaign. The right-wing billionaire Bob Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer, had shifted his support to Trump with a $5 million infusion. Believing the campaign was cratering, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser—with other potential donors bailing by the second—at New York Jets owner and Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson’s summer house in the Hamptons. Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire his