“I can’t believe they stole this thing. Can you believe they stole it? Georgia completely stolen. Completely. But Kemp is done, I tell you, Kemp, he’s one of the only two races I’m one hundred percent getting involved in. He’s finished. Lisa”—referring to Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski—“is the other one. I gave her the drilling, but she’s always been nasty to me. The other is Kemp. He’s finished. Doug”—he said to Collins, standing above the others sitting around the conference table—“you would have been a better candidate than Loeffler. So much better. So, what would you rather be, a senator or governor? I could see you being a good governor. A great governor.”

“Sir,” said Collins, uncomfortably, “I just want to make sure we get Loeffler and Perdue back in the Senate.”

“But what do you think about being governor?”

“Umm … well, I don’t—”

“You think about how that sounds, ‘Governor Collins.’”

“You realize,” said Miller, laughing, when the president left, “he’s going to say that during the rally? You might want to come up with what your response is going to be, because he’s saying it.”

Which he did, in his two-hour speech, staking his claim on Georgia’s political future and his unhappiness over other political concerns. Still, though he delivered his lines about Loeffler and Perdue and referenced a world in which it was possible—not that it had happened, but with the Dems’ having rigged it, that this might be the result—that he had in fact lost the election.

But there was always the discrepancy between his scripted words and his true words—the logic, or illogic, which powerfully, even rapturously gripped him and which he could not shake and to which, putting political sense aside, he needed to bear witness. Indeed, he laid out in Georgia quite a real-time sense of what he and, practically speaking, he alone had come to believe, a veritable catechism of the information he had selected and absorbed to argue his case. The manic and idiotic nature of his view is perhaps the strongest argument against his cynicism—he was in the weeds of fixation and delusion.