At virtually every point where Trump stopped to take a breath, the crowd responded, heartily and furiously, with shouts of “Stop the steal”—it, too, committed to an ecstatic view of Trump’s reelection and its righteousness and overpowering emotion.

On December 8, Jason Miller learned from a contact on Capitol Hill that a briefing booklet had been sent to Republican congressional offices under his name, titled “Five States and the Illegal Votes: Why the November 3, 2020, General Election Was Not Won by Biden.” Miller discovered that the booklet had been written by Cleta Mitchell, a longtime fixture in conservative Beltway legal circles. Meadows had brought Mitchell into the election challenge, but she seemed to be doing this work under the radar of her partners at Foley and Lardner, a major international law firm.

The booklet outlined a series of specific claims, including 66,247 underage voters in Georgia and 305,701 people who had applied for absentee ballots prior to the eligibility period; in Michigan, 500,000 mail-in votes were counted without “meaningful” Republican observation; in Pennsylvania, it was 680,000 mail-in votes that had been counted without Republican observation; in Arizona, more than 700,000 mail-in votes were counted without Republican oversight.

The charges were drawn from the salad of numbers and allegations floating in from the Giuliani team, from many of the various lawsuits that had been rejected, and from rump local initiatives and complaints. In other words, there was no central source, no true vetting, and no clear provenance for any of these numbers.

Mitchell told Miller that she thought the campaign should be more out front in terms of informing people, and that the booklet should go out to every name on the nationwide Trump list, arming them with the facts. Equally though, it also seemed that she did not necessarily want her name on the “facts.”

Miller said he needed to have the campaign research team review it before they blasted it out—and there it died.

On Friday evening, December 11, three days after the individual states certified their electoral votes and three days before electors were to meet in their respective state capitals to cast their votes, the Supreme Court perfunctorily dismissed the Texas-initiated lawsuit. Filed on Monday, the seventh, the suit the president had taken to calling “the big one,” which he seemed to see as a kind of rising-up of red states—quite a Fort Sumter moment—was dead by the end of the week.

The idea that one state or a group of states could object to how another state conducted its elections did not even merit an argument before the court.