But then, out of nowhere, Josh Hawley stood up. Certainly, nobody in the White House had seen this coming—once again, rather than an organized initiative, it was the freelancers taking control and advantage of the situation.

The forty-one-year-old Hawley, in the Senate for only two years, was marked most of all by his ambition, which was quite a thing to be marked by in the U.S. Senate. His impatience was clear; he had already and repeatedly butted heads with McConnell, and he seemed proud to let people know that the U.S. Senate was not where he wanted to spend his career. A Stanford and Yale Law School grad, he had come to the Senate from Missouri after an aggressive stint as the Missouri attorney general, where he pursued the state’s Democrat-turned-Republican governor, forcing him to resign.

Hawley had quickly moved to position himself as the purest and most outspoken and most electable Senate right-winger on the populist side. This was juxtaposed with the other purest and most outspoken and (at least in his own view) most electable Senate right-winger, Ted Cruz, another Ivy Leaguer, on the conservative establishment side. Both men were widely disliked in the Senate, and both were singularly focused on the 2024 presidential race—both Ivy Leaguers privately scornful of Trump and both necessarily trying to make common cause with his base.

Cruz had been debating doing exactly what Hawley now had done—jumping out and becoming the most prominent Trump defender and claiming 2024 MAGA rights. The problem was that Cruz hated Trump (Trump, in 2016, had not only stolen the right-wing mantle from Cruz but ridiculed his wife, and, Cruz believed, planted stories in the National Enquirer about Cruz’s sex life) and was openly telling people how nuts the whole election challenge was.

He debated too long.

Joining the House members who planned to challenge certain state electors, Hawley forced Cruz’s hand. Cruz, in a panic, rushed in with ten other senators, in what now seemed like a jailbreak, to join as many as 140 House members in what would be quite a spectacular piece of theater on January 6.

So, somehow, despite the known outcome, you nevertheless had a cliff-hanger, and for no one so much as the president.

8

THE DAY BEFORE

The short background for what was to happen in the Joint Session of Congress on January 6: