A 42-year-old operative who’d worked for the Tea Party group Americans for Prosperity, Lewandowski was now the campaign manager. Hicks was told she couldn’t work for both the political and corporate branches of the Trump team. She had to choose: Join the campaign or go back to the kids’ floor of Trump Tower. Hicks, who hates to disappoint, nonetheless told Lewandowski he’d have to find a new press secretary, which apparently set him off. “He made her cry a bunch of times,” Nunberg said. In Nunberg’s telling, Lewandowski said to Hicks, “You made a big fucking mistake; you’re fucking dead to me.” Lewandowski declined to either confirm or correct Nunberg’s recollection. “I don’t recall the specifics of that,” he told me. “I can say definitively that I don’t recall the specific incident that you’re referring to.”

Hicks reconsidered when Trump told her to stay. As she traveled with him and a tiny band of staffers around the country, things with Lewandowski eventually mended. Meanwhile, Lewandowski was consolidating power. Racist Facebook posts Nunberg had made beginning in 2007 surfaced and prompted his firing. (He trashed everyone from Al Sharpton to Marxist Muslims to Louis Farrakhan.) Nunberg believes it was Hicks and Lewandowski who petitioned Trump for his ouster and drafted a brutal statement that characterized him as a “low-level part-time consultant.”

Nunberg still seemed wounded eight months later, when we met. “Of course she ratfucked me, which makes me proud,” he told me. Nunberg maintains no feelings of warmth for Lewandowski. “I literally will suck the fucking blood out of his skull by the time I’m done with him,” he said like a screwball gangster. Not long after Nunberg’s firing, his mentor, Stone, left. (Stone says he quit, but the campaign claims he was fired.) The circle was getting smaller, and Hicks, the only staffer without a bald spot or a tough-guy lilt, had apparently learned how to hang on.