The increasingly fitful and surly president was suddenly full of exclamations and murmurs of pleasure and oohs and ahs. Indeed, Trump had a notable lack of a poker face, his glee as evident and as uncontrollable as his scowl.

“So, all Mike has to do is object?”

“All he has to do.”

“He doesn’t have to—”

“All up to his discretion.”

“Totally up to him to send these votes back?” His elation was filling the room.

“Totally.”

The president was meeting with an academic who was offering, at best, an academic theory. But here was one of the most promising meetings the president had recently had. He was as spun up as he had been in several weeks. If things had been looking bad, now they were coming up roses. Here was all he had ever needed: a lawyer who could solve the problem.

“But do you really think this could happen?” Cipollone asked Eastman as they left the Oval Office.

“Theoretically, maybe,” said Eastman, “but not likely.”

“You just told the president of United States this is a doable thing,” said a confounded Cipollone.

“Well, worth a shot,” said Eastman, shrugging—and departing, having dismissed his own theory, which would become the predicate for the events of January 6.

7

THE ENDGAME

Yes … there was zero doubt about how this was going to turn out: Joe Biden was going to be the president. It was not a political contest or a courtroom drama whose outcome hung in the balance. Some people tried to find parallels with Watergate and Nixon’s effort to hold on to power as support drained. But then there were opportunities for doubt and reversal. Here, beyond the fantastic and apocalyptic, there were none. Not in anyone’s mind except Trump’s and those of the people almost everyone else considered hopelessly sycophantic or unglued who had gathered around him, some hardly capable of walking a straight line.

Oh, and apparently in the hearts and minds of untold millions of Americans.

Here was a mirror-reality mash-up that Trump effortlessly attached to the narrative, a fight against the swamp, corrupt Dems, media elites, woke corporations, all trying to undermine him and get him out of office—hence, election fraud. Why did a large majority of Republicans believe, against the reasonable evidence, that there had been widespread fraud? Because he had said there was. As succinctly as the pollster Tony Fabrizio had put it when he urged Trump to support masks—“Mr. President, your voters believe whatever you tell them to believe”—they now believed in a massive election conspiracy. And, what’s more, Trump was telling people to switch from Fox News to Newsmax and OAN, giving each network a great new audience and a reward for its slavish adherence to this new Trump narrative.