Two important elements, pushed here by Meadows but certainly supported by everyone else, had been written into the president’s speech: a clear endorsement of the Republican candidates, Loeffler and Perdue, to motivate rather than, as he had surely been doing with his fraud rants, demotivate Georgia Republicans to get out to the polls; and an acknowledgment, however oblique, that he might have lost, even if only in the subjunctive: if he had lost. Getting Trump to follow this part of the script would, in the West Wing and larger Republican circles, be perceived as great progress—that is, if everything else that might be ad-libbed in whatever direction his riffs went did not hopelessly overwhelm these two points.

You could not know where he would go.

Louie Gohmert, the Texas congressman who, even among Republicans, was a head-shaking figure of Tea Party and Trumpian thickness and folly, was on board, passing out chocolate-covered pecans—called Millionaire$—sliding more down the table as soon as anybody stopped chewing. (“Do you have an interest in this company?” one of the passengers asked. “Nope, just like ’em,” said Gohmert.) So was Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair who had cemented her position by delivering the party apparatus to Trump; and Doug Collins, who had given up his House seat to run in the Senate primary in Georgia, but failed to qualify for a runoff spot, whoTrump had made his point person for the Georgia recount. Jason Miller, Kayleigh McEnany, Dan Scavino, and Brian Jack, the thirty-three-year-old White House political director (the guy the president called for details and factoids about presidential campaigns—Trump’s Google) who was from Georgia, were also around the conference table.

It was a tricky dynamic, focusing on the Senate mission while not in any way suggesting that the true and larger mission was not the defense and, indeed, the reelection of Donald Trump—bowing to the ostensible mission while at the same time having everyone know you were really on board for the true mission.

Notably, the president kept visiting the group around the conference table. Usually not a social mixer when the presidential party traveled, making at best a single perfunctory visit, he seemed now to be searching for some affirmation, not so much mixing, though, or conversing as repeating the now-familiar lines.