I think it’s pretty clear that we won. We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We’d be getting 25–30,000 people a rally, and the competition would get less than 100 people. And it never made sense …

We think that if you check the signatures—a real check of the signatures going back in Fulton County—you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures of people who have been forged. And we are quite sure that’s going to happen …

You don’t need much of a number because the number that in theory I lost by, the margin would be 11,779. But you also have a substantial numbers of people, thousands and thousands, who went to the voting place on November 3, were told they couldn’t vote, were told they couldn’t vote because a ballot had been put on their name. And you know that’s very, very, very, very sad …

So there were many infractions, and the bottom line is, many, many times the 11,779 margin that they said we lost by—we had vast, I mean the state is in turmoil over this …

And I know you would like to get to the bottom of it, although I saw you on television today, and you said that you found nothing wrong. I mean, you know, and I didn’t lose the state, Brad. People have been saying that it was the highest vote ever …

So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.

The call went on for an hour with Trump talking, uninterrupted, for long parts of it, reciting random numbers, anecdotal evidence, leaps of logic—with, one might imagine, everybody listening at some level of alarm and incomprehension. Meadows interrupted him at several points to try to restate what he might mean. Raffensperger interrupted to flatly correct Trump’s numbers—largely destroying his argument. But mostly it was all Trump, not a discussion, but a diatribe. And a loopy one. Venting, with the larger point being that he believed he had won regardless of what the vote by all other reasonable measures seemed to be. That is, it is crazy stuff. Out there. Disconnected. With everybody understanding this and taking some pity.

Part of the reason Trump aides often misunderstood their own danger was that they went along to protect the president from himself—in Trumpworld parlance, the people with him were keeping it from being so much worse than it otherwise might be. The other reason is that, when around it all the time, you came to regard Trump as so much hot air—he talked for the sake of talking, without meaningful effect. He is unaware of what he is saying. He has no faculty for processing what he is saying. He’s in the ozone. In that sense, he is an innocent.