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Dedication

For Paolo Lanapoppi

Epigraph

“We won. Won in a landslide. This was a landslide.”

—PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, JANUARY 6, 2021

INTRODUCTION

From the New York Times:

… [an] examination of the 77 democracy-bending days between election and inauguration shows how, with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media.

In the aftermath of that broken afternoon at the Capitol, a picture has emerged of entropic forces coming together on Trump’s behalf in an ad hoc, yet calamitous, crash of rage and denial.

But interviews with central players, and documents including previously unreported emails, videos and social media posts scattered across the web, tell a more encompassing story of a more coordinated campaign.

Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.

January 31, 2021

Except …

In the days and weeks after Election Day on November 3, the president was deserted by his aides and staff. The legal establishment, at least anyone in it with a promising career, abandoned him. His hapless band of co-conspirators were too crazy or drunk or cynical to develop a credible strategy or execute one. It was all a shit show—ludicrous, inexplicable, cringeworthy, nutso, even for the people who felt most loyal to him. The election challenge never had a chance of success.

Trump’s presidency was a mirror image of good government and the normal workings of the bureaucracy, but his final days were a further quantum-leap departure from any system capable of achieving support or successful results—or, for that matter, even an underhand and sham result.

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump was to charge him with explicit plans and strategy and intent—his final days in office a calculated effort to do anything to remain in office. But for those who saw Trump up close, even for those who believed he was profoundly guilty of so many things, this was not getting it at all. Rather, the opposite: Trump’s true assault on democratic norms was to have removed organization, strategy, method, rationale, and conscious decision making from the highest level of government.