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When I asked Greene about the alleged affair, she replied by texting me a series of screenshots from Chambers’s social-media accounts, including a photo of the sign he put up on his gym. “Let me be clear with you,” Greene texted. “Writing defamatory articles about me is a very bad choice. Be very wise in who your ‘sources’ are.” She also directed me to her attorney, L. Lin Wood, who has lately been suggesting, on Twitter, that Trump’s political opponents deliberately infected the President with the novel coronavirus. When sent a series of claims and allegations about Greene that are addressed in this piece, Wood responded by insisting that the piece was “intended to smear her with false accusations, half-truths, misrepresentations, out-of-context statements, and agenda driven lies”—but, like Greene, he did not specifically refute or deny any of the particular allegations or claims presented to him.

He also circulated an e-mail that one of the medical chairs had sent to his department. “Now is the time to accept the hazards of caring for the sick . . . rather than focusing on making a few extra dollars,” that e-mail read. “I am not indifferent to your anxieties but personally feel demanding hazard pay is not becoming of a compassionate and caring physician.”

For those defending themselves against the lawsuits, their attorneys’ power of discovery would give them extraordinary access to Alfa Bank’s records. But Aven, Khan, and Fridman claim that they do not control their own documents at the bank and cannot produce them. (Public records show that together they control more than sixty per cent of the bank.)

Employees had questions about where Tron was headed and submitted anonymous questions for BitTorrent’s traditional Q&A with the company’s senior leadership. Hours before the Q&A, Sun called together his marketing team “to send him the list of questions,” so he could censor questions he didn’t like, says a former employee officially briefed on the meeting. Sun started reading existential questions about Tron’s future, such as, “What if TRX [Tron’s crypto] drops to zero?” Sun’s mood soured instantly. “He took it extremely personally.” According to the employee, he began yelling and threw a tantrum. “Whoever asked this question, we’re going to track them down,” Sun seethed, before threatening “to kill their entire family.”

Anna studied him. She has blond hair, cut asymmetrically, and wore a cobalt-blue shirt. “No,” she said. “You’re a good example of post-traumatic growth.” In 2004, she had accompanied her father to the site one last time before the towers came down. At dinner, she said that in footage of that visit “you can see the exact moment when you realize this is a stillbirth. You’re brokenhearted. You were misunderstood, blackmailed, your reputation was murdered.”

In the crowd, I noticed men muttering into walkie-talkies, their eyes hidden behind wraparound shades. To me they had the aspect of children playing at war, only their guns were real. There was a loud bang, and I whirled around as hands moved toward triggers. But someone had only knocked a metal sign onto the pavement.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, Trump has denied or diminished the seriousness of covid-19, from its initial outbreak in China to its spread to Europe and beyond. In interviews with Bob Woodward, for the journalist’s book “Rage,” Trump admitted that he well understood from advisers how lethal and fast-spreading the disease could be, but in public statements he downplayed the danger, saying repeatedly that the virus would disappear with the summer’s warm weather and that there was little to worry about. To the despair of the scientific and medical communities, which have uniformly said that the disease can be best contained if people wear protective masks and maintain a social distance, Trump has repeatedly flouted their advice and touted disreputable treatments. As recently as Tuesday’s Presidential debate, in Cleveland, Trump mocked his opponent, Joe Biden, for wearing masks and practicing social distancing. “I don’t wear masks like him,” Trump said sarcastically of Biden, at the debate. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking two hundred feet away from him, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

Ordinarily, allegations like those that have trailed Guilfoyle would likely prove disqualifying for someone seeking a prominent role in the political arena, particularly in a party trying to close a gender gap. But high-profile female Trump supporters like Guilfoyle provide valuable cover for the President. As Susan Faludi, the feminist author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,” points out, “From Amy Coney Barrett to Betsy DeVos to Kimberly Guilfoyle, every woman Trump picks is an emblem of everything women are up against.”

As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,” he said. Trump told the public that the government was doing all it could, but the P.P.E. emergency was being managed by a handful of amateurs. “It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years,” Kennedy said. “It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting.”

As Election Day approaches, the President has escalated his level of incitement. With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, last week, a battle with the Democrats in the Senate is almost inevitable. Trump has already moved from allegations of fraud to intimations of unlawfulness and violence. “Gotta be careful with those ballots,” he said on September 8th, in a speech in North Carolina. “Watch those ballots. I don’t like it.” He continued, “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.” Trump has advised his supporters to vote twice—once by absentee and once at the polls, to make sure their votes count. (This would be a crime.) He has expressed sympathy for the anti-Black Lives Matter counter-protesters who fired paintballs at their adversaries in Portland, and has defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the pro-Trump vigilante who is accused of killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump also retweeted a prediction that political unrest “could lead to ‘rise of citizen militias around the country.’ ” In light of these provocations, it seems that anything short of a landslide for either Biden or Trump could lead to chaos. It’s unsurprising that, when the Transition Integrity Project, a group of a hundred bipartisan experts, ran a series of simulations, they concluded that “the potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”