Rudy Giuliani in hospital with Covid, leaving Trump even more isolated
The President is today facing another piece of bleak news in his forlorn and hopeless effort to overturn Joe Biden's election victory.
His person lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, the man masterminding the President's legal battle, is now in hospital with Covid. The news was announced by Donald Trump himself on Twitter.
Giuliani is one of 53 of the President's advisers who have caught the virus, an extraordinary toll, but not surprising given the complacency evident around his inner circle for months. The irony is inescapable.
For months, these advisers - like Trump himself - have been minimising the risks of the virus, often dismissive of social distancing and of mask-wearing.
Giuliani is in a Washington hospital after suffering mild symptoms. It means that many more of the President's legal advisers may now have to go into self-isolation.
In another troubling development, many of the state politicians that Giuliani has been visiting to persuade them that the election was stolen will themselves now have to enter quarantine. It appears that Giuliani's legal effort in states like Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania wasn't just hopeless, it was potentially lethal.
Rudy Giuliani was once known as "America's Mayor" for his inspired handling of the 9/11 attacks on New York, in which his defiance of the terrorists and his communication skills helped create a sense of national solidarity. But in recent months he has cut a lonely and widely-mocked figure. He is held in contempt by Democrats for his sycophantic attitude to Trump and for his attempt to smear Joe Biden. The nadir was his desperate press conference in which he tried to prove - without evidence - that the 2020 election had indeed been rigged. With sweat and hair dye running down his face, it made for one of the most striking and embarrassing images of the year.
It follows a bizarre weekend in which Trump held his first rally since the election and came up with another series of falsehoods - a "fire-hose of lies" as his critics put it - including claims he won the state of Georgia.
The President showed no sign of accepting the political reality that he lost the election, although he did suggest he would run again in 2024.
Amid all of this, the President-elect has been trying to rise above the noise. Joe Biden asked that Americans take maximum efforts to keep the virus at bay, calling it a patriotic duty.
The President now has just 44 days left in the White House, and now the health of his lawyer - the man he will need the most after January 20th - is in serious doubt.