Pence had been faithful in his support of the legal effort but meticulous in his language. His chief of staff, Marc Short, had crafted a fine line between pursuing all legal options, as would be the president’s right, and a broadside charge against the integrity of the election process. Trump yet took seemingly hairsplitting note, and also was reminded by Giuliani and others that, after the December 14 gathering of electors in state capitals, Pence seemed to excise the world fraud from his comments on the election. What’s more, Trump believed, Pence was hardly doing all he could do to push his friend Doug Ducey, Arizona’s governor, with leverage that might help the Trump effort in the swing state to support the election challenge. (“That’s Mike’s friend, Ducey, he’s no good to us with the steal,” the president complained.)

Marc Short was regarded as one of the most competent operators in the White House. A K Street conduit with close connections to the billionaire Koch brothers’ conservative philanthropies and lobbying efforts and a long career within the Republican congressional establishment, the fifty-year-old was a Trump archetype. He detested the president but saw a tight-lipped tolerance, however painful, as the way to use Trump’s popularity to realize the conservative grail of remaking the federal courts and the federal bureaucracy. People often bypassed the president’s chief of staff, whoever that was at different times, to go directly to Short. Short and the VP’s wife, Karen, were the political brain trust that far outshone any strategic structure that the president or his aides were ever able to put in place.

While Pence had adapted to his designated role as unwavering Trump loyalist, his wife and chief of staff, tactically supporting this loyalist position, were significantly less circumspect in their views of the president. Karen Pence, it was clear, was disdainful of Trump, his family, and his aides, revolted even. Trumpworld for her was Sodom and Gomorrah meets The Wolf of Wall Street.

On Trump’s part, he regarded Pence as malleable and his wife as a quite annoying counterweight to bending the vice president to what he wanted him to do. He considered Short a Koch brothers pawn, often seeming to forget or feigning to forget Short’s name and calling him the “Koch guy.”

As early as anyone in the Trump White House, quite within hours of the election, Short understood that Trump had lost and that he had no chance of advancing any of his claims of victory, and began to carefully plot the vice president’s final days.