In fact, the next day was as chaotic as the night before; there was no new direction. Both Meadows and Giuliani had rushed into the Oval; perhaps their intervention had kept Powell, as outré and preposterous a figure as had ever been in the Oval Office, from becoming the most significant legal figure in the Trump administration. Or, as likely, this was all a passing diversion for the president. A fancy in the moment.

Herschmann, intent on protecting not only the president but himself, essentially posited that the crazies might well have been able to push the president “to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines, and disable the primary levers of American democracy” if they had not been opposed by White House lawyers. But this elides the point that the nature of the Trump chaos is that, beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability—or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call—to make anything happen. How exactly would the Department of Defense be suborned to seize someone’s property, and where would that property be taken? And what would be done with it?

The crazies in and out of the Oval Office, with everyone else who was in and out of the Oval Office, were far closer to court jesters than generals in charge. As much to the point: there were no generals in charge.

Shortly before Christmas, it was finally impressed upon Trump—Meadows’s voice was prominent here—that the Senate races in Georgia were in deep jeopardy, and that he would be blamed for the loss. Certainly, he had seemed to do everything possible to inhibit the chances of a Georgia Senate victory.

If he needed a Senate majority to push forward on his election challenge on January 6, he could lose it after January 1.

Trump believed he had an easy fix: he denounced the stimulus agreement his own treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin—and his own administration—had negotiated with equally resistant Republicans and Democrats through the autumn. That agreement gave individuals gifts of six hundred dollars. In an overnight inspiration undercutting Republicans and his treasury secretary, and delighting Democrats, Trump, focusing on the Georgia races, now wanted to raise the amount to two thousand dollars.

Cash in the pocket, in the best political tradition (cash with his name on it), could well make the difference in a tight race.

“I simply want to get our great people $2000, rather than the measly $600 that is now in the bill,” Trump tweeted.