As the great unwashed were gathering, on the evening of January 5 there was another gathering, at the Trump Hotel, of ranking Republicans, all primarily there to plan and to fundraise for 2022. This included a circle of top-draw Trump celebrities, Don Jr., Michael Flynn, and Corey Lewandowski among them, and presentations by groups, like the Republican Attorneys General Association, looking for 2022 funding.

The primary organizer was Caroline Wren, the most prodigious fundraiser in the Republican Party. On the eve of a protest over the 2020 election, Wren had assembled thirty to forty major Republican donors to hear about political investment needs for 2022.

Wren was a contract fundraiser, hired by groups or candidates to raise money through her own efforts, out of which she received a commission that could run from 15 to 40 percent. Wren, close to Don Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle—Wren raised money for Guilfoyle’s Mar-a-Lago birthday party—–was a key fundraiser for the Trump 2020 campaign. Now, she had raised much of the money to fund the next day’s rally at which the president would speak. She had, in other words, raised money for an event that would bring people to Washington, which would in turn become an opportunity to raise more money.

She was hardly the only one. The organizers of the rally where the president would speak included Amy Kremer and her daughter Kylie Jane Kremer, Tea Party and pro-Trump Super PAC activists, organizers, and fundraisers; Ali Alexander, another right-wing organizer and Trump fundraiser; and Alex Jones, the conspiracist media personality—each of them with a direct financial interest in the day’s events and in future dealings with the Trump money machine.

Their connections to the Trump campaign would further implicate the president in the next day’s events—Wren helped fund a robocall encouraging protestors to march on the Capitol—but certainly, given their broader financial interests, their involvement here suggested as much about business as it did about rioting.

January 6, for many, was about the money.

Trump aides would label each one of them grifters (a key word in the Trump White House to apply to others so as to not be described that way yourself) and hangers-on. Trump himself would take sour note of the money they were making off of him. But this was yet a hunger game of Trump loyalty as measured by money raised and crowds produced. What was being foreshadowed here were the coming claims on the Trump franchise.

This was the prize: to be at the head of the class among the solicitors for the Trump cause. Here, at its professional core, distinguished from the interests of its mere attendees, was what the January 6 rally was about, a hierarchy of players looking to maintain and strengthen their ties to the ongoing Trump political enterprise.

Trump wasn’t devoting much thought to the groups amassing for the next day’s rally.