Here was another central fact of the moment: a lot of lawyers who knew that their stuff was full of shit were telling the president it anyway, because he expected them to. This was deeply disturbing for many of the remaining White House staffers still trying to hold on to basic political and bureaucratic craft—that is, what passed for basic Washington reality (i.e., you didn’t want to be laughed out of the Supreme Court). This was a group most closely identified with Kushner. Indeed, what sustained them here was, in part, that Kushner, communicating this by his absences, understood the folly.

Again, everyone understood. And everyone understood that everyone else understood.

Even those who had adopted support for Trump’s unreality as the existential condition of modern Republican politics understood that the Trump legal case was not viable or even intelligible and, for that matter, that nothing would keep Trump president beyond January 20.

In a sense, this was good news of an equivocal sort: everybody in a position of power and authority, no matter how signed up to Trump reality they seemed to be, grasped the true reality.

At any rate, the Texas attorney general’s bid to the Court to extend the December 14 certification of electoral votes in the four crucial states pending further investigation was denied, which meant that this goalpost, like all the previous goalposts, wasn’t budging.

Giuliani, from his quarantine, ever attentive to the president’s moods and to the necessity of feeding Trump what he wanted to hear, sent in the conservative California constitutional lawyer John Eastman, who, to Trump’s pleasure, had written an article claiming that Kamala Harris wasn’t a natural born citizen and therefore couldn’t be vice president. Eastman had turned opinions on a variety of hot-button conservative legal issues into many television appearances. It was Eastman’s theories about vice-presidential discretion that Giuliani had been floating and that had made their way to Marc Short.

On January 6, the vice president would preside over the counting of the electoral votes in the Senate Chamber. This was, heretofore and by all, widely regarded as a ceremonial duty with no real function or discretion on the part of the vice president. Eastman, sitting in a chair directly facing the president behind his desk, now argued, to the discomfiture of Pat Cipollone, sitting in on the meeting, that in fact the vice president had wide powers. Eastman told the president that the vice president could reject any of these votes and simply replace Biden electors with Trump electors. Or, he could send the Biden electors back to their respective state legislatures for further consideration and scrutiny, where they then might be replaced. Either scenario could give Trump his Electoral College victory and the presidency.

Hence, the only issue was convincing the vice president to exercise this power.