It was always a safe place to be: to wave the flag for a symbolic stance that might seem popular but for which, because it would never happen—beyond the tweets, so much in Trumpworld never actually happened—you would never be held to account.

It was for the show of it.

Again: the singular point was that everyone knew that nothing was going to alter the election results. The New York Times and MSNBC and the liberal echo chamber would predictably get its collective panties in a twist, generating gratifying right-wing pushback for Republicans standing up for the president. But the Electoral College count would take place on January 6, and Joe Biden would be certified as the next president. And on January 20, he would be sworn in as the president of the United States. Everyone knew this—everyone but the president. A political party, or a large faction of it, was indulging its leader’s fantasy. The paramount leader was unaware that he stood naked in the crowd before everybody.

Mo Brooks, a sixty-six-year-old congressman from Alabama, was a figure of high standing in a somewhat dubious club called the Dead-Enders, a rump Republican Party faction legacy from the introduction of Tea Party members to Congress in 2011. “Dead-Enders” was once a name applied as a negative, but like that other once-negative name, “deplorables,” it had become something of a term of affection. Along with Brooks, other members included Louie Gohmert, from Texas; Andy Biggs, from Arizona; Matt Gaetz, from Florida; Paul Gosar, the dentist from Arizona; and Jim Jordan, the former wrestling coach from Ohio. Their résumés were unimpressive; their general intelligence raising many eyebrows; their social skills limited. Still, in the purity of their own self-caricatures, they achieved quite an outsize portion of media notice. They would, given the opportunity, push ever further for that attention. Effectively, that’s what they were doing in Congress: they were character actors playing the role of right-wing ghouls, martyrs, heroes, disruptors. But since Trump’s election, they had promoted themselves from mere character actors to leading roles.

On December 16, Brooks announced his effort to overturn the election by challenging the certification of electoral votes in various key states. This had been done before, as protest or stunt, notably by several Democrats when Trump’s own count was certified in 2016, and, in 2004, by former California senator Barbara Boxer, indeed over allegations of rigged voting machines. The procedural hurdle, to take the next step beyond merely standing up and saying your piece, was that a challenge from a House member had to be joined by one from a Senate member—precisely the step McConnell and his posse were trying to warn members away from.