Live updates: Biden to visit with wounded troops at Walter Reed after a busy stretch of executive actions

Air Force One was fueled and ready for the final flight.

This was the end for Trump, the last hours of a progressively more noxious and isolated presidency. But as he was poised to fly south from Joint Base Andrews into the uncertainty of his after-times, Ronna McDaniel was able to get him on the line.

McDaniel, the unfailingly amiable chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, had stood by Trump, even as a trickle of GOP luminaries abandoned him. She had been Trump’s handpicked choice to lead the GOP four years earlier, and she had been loyal up to a point: gently critical of his most profane outbursts and divisive rhetoric, but buoyantly supportive of his policies and his often erratic conduct in office.

She had also pushed early for investigations into possible voter fraud in the 2020 presidential balloting, a position that gave oxygen to Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen. But as time went on, she stopped short of endorsing many of Trump’s most outrageous and unsupported assertions and has since accepted that he was defeated at the polls.