Not incidentally, the two thousand dollars was also aimed directly at McConnell, who would either have to bow to Trump and accept the new number, exactly what he had been negotiating against, or reject it and be blamed by Trump for losing the Georgia races. Mnuchin, collateral damage, was now open in the contempt for Trump he had long struggled to keep private. (Trump aides, keeping track, would move Mnuchin into the uppermost ranks of Trump haters among current and former Trump officials, a large club.)

McConnell marked this as a final indication that it had become a White House of one—no voice meant anything but Trump’s. McConnell conveyed his rejection of the two-thousand-dollar scheme through one of his aides to one of Trump’s—using the same language Rupert Murdoch had used on Election Night when Fox had called the Arizona race against the president: “Fuck him.”

On December 23, Trump left for Mar-a-Lago with the vice president, a man he had never given all that much thought to, keenly on his mind.

Most people credited the stable relationship between president and vice president to Pence’s artful loyalty. But Trump, too—while not so privately marveling at Pence’s ass-licking qualities and with an oft-spoken distaste for Pence’s wife, Karen, who he accurately suspected did not like him—nevertheless seemed to appreciate that a conflagration with Pence of the type he had had with so many in his administration might just be a kind of third rail for evangelicals and for the bedrock conservatives in Congress. The vice president and the president each did his part in avoiding the obvious contradiction between heartland religious conservatism and Trumpism, and between a follow-the-rules vice president and a break-everything president. In a sense, this was the paradigm relationship of the political era, neither wanting to fully test who might represent the stronger force—and in this, the two forces converged.

The vice president was a disciplined man, and this had surely helped him in observing the key attribute needed as Trump’s vice president: to separate your knowable actions and opinions from what you were otherwise thinking. Most others in the Trump White House, outside the small group of family and devoted soldiers who saw Trump as their necessary North Star, could sooner or later no longer keep those two things separate, and fell from favor. But the vice president had fashioned a public face that was both inscrutable and benighted, and seemingly as unwavering as the Queen’s Guard. The fly that had landed on Pence’s white head during the 2020 vice- presidential debate without effecting the slightest response from him summed up both his stoicism and his imperturbability.

Even Trump seemed to find Pence too good to be true, wondering how he could be such a “stiff” and a “square.” And likewise, as though a corollary, he regarded Pence as someone not tough, as someone who, he increasingly pointed out, could be “rolled.”