It is a further curious note that the symbolic nature of this, its entire lack of practical or even procedural significance, seems to have been understood by the president’s own legal team. Or, as another telling note, this was how disorganized and ineffectual the legal team was: Nobody reached out to Brooks. Nobody from the White House was actually in touch with him. Nobody was coordinating with anybody. Nobody from the White House was managing what in a real world would need to be one of the greatest congressional confrontations of modern times.

Except the president, sort of. In a conversation with Tommy Tuberville, Trump proposed that Tuberville speak up on his behalf. Tuberville, a former college football coach, had, with Trump’s support, entered the Alabama Republican Senate primary in 2020 against Jeff Sessions, the former Alabama senator (and the first senator in 2016 to endorse Trump) who joined the administration as attorney general only to become, for various perceived offenses against Trump, a public enemy. Beating Sessions in a race most characterized by Trump’s continued abuse of Sessions, Tuberville then ran in the general election against the Democrat Doug Jones, who had slipped into office in this overwhelming Republican state because his Republican opponent, Roy Moore, was found to have cruised for underage girls in various Alabama malls. At any rate, Trump, never reticent on this account, had in many ways handed Tuberville the Senate seat—one that Tuberville would not formally take until next month (and he was, therefore, not yet under McConnell’s watch)—and now suggested what Tuberville could do for him in return.

Still, because he was not actually yet a senator, Tuberville, who now at the president’s behest offered himself up as possible objection to certification in the Senate, seemed like an outlier taking an eccentric and even loopy position.

One of the odder figures in the Trump White House—and this was saying a lot—was the president’s trade advisor, Peter Navarro. He was distinguished by his abject desire to curry favor with the president, permanently stationing himself in the outer Oval Office, and by being so disagreeable, abrasive, and contrary that he was unable to get along with anyone other than the president.

Navarro was one of the few remaining holdover figures from the Steve Bannon era in the White House and was still thought of by some as a Bannon sock puppet, Navarro’s voice a baroque mix of deep-state, anti-China, return-to-manufacturing-nirvana gobbledygook.

In the sweepstakes of who lived in the world farthest removed from reality, Navarro’s planet was often singled out. If he could have initiated a war with China, he would have—but failing that, he lived in a constant state of agitation and paranoia that he was being spied on by all those less hostile to China than he was.