“Hold on a minute, Sidney,” Herschmann interrupted from the back of the Oval. “You’re part of the Rudy team, right? Is your theory that the Democrats got together and changed the rules, or is it that there was foreign interference in our election?”

“It’s foreign interference,” Powell insisted, then added: “Rudy hasn’t understood what this case is about until just now.”

In disbelief, Herschmann yelled out to an aide in the outer Oval Office. “Get Pat down here immediately!” Several minutes later, White House counsel Pat Cipollone walked into the Oval. He looked at Byrne and said, “Who are you?”

Flynn went berserk. The former three-star general, whom Trump had fired as his first national security advisor after he was caught lying to the FBI (and later pardoned), stood up and turned from the Resolute Desk to face Herschmann.

“You’re quitting! You’re a quitter! You’re not fighting!” he exploded at the senior advisor. Flynn then turned to the president and implored: “Sir, we need fighters.”

Herschmann ignored Flynn at first and continued to probe Powell’s pitch with questions about the underlying evidence. “All you do is promise, but never deliver,” he said to her sharply.

But perhaps the most telling line in the Axios story was the following:

Trump was behind the desk, watching the show. He briefly left the meeting to wander into his private dining room.

Trump, according to the story, would shortly return to engage in the discussion when the issue became the typos filed in one of Powell’s briefs, traversing in the blink of an eye from martial law to misspellings.

The point here, in the telling of the insiders, was in part to absolve Trump of direct responsibility: he’s a passive party to the crazies. This account made him a kind of Chance the Gardener figure, from the Jerzy Kosinski novel and Peter Sellers film Being There. But it missed the larger truth: that Trump was the orchestrator of the chaos. He thrived in the middle of it. Indeed, there existed the possibility that overturning the election was not even his main goal. Rather, the joy and energy of the resulting chaos was.

Fight, fight, who was ready to fight? More fight was what was needed, was the president’s message, more attitude than plan. Cipollone, as always, and here this evening, was called out by the president as the man with the least amount of fight.

“You can’t count on Pat,” said the president with a shrug.