The presidential race in 1876, between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York, ended with disputed slates in three states and a single disputed elector in a fourth. The difference between that race and 2020 was that the four states in the Hayes-Tilden imbroglio were intensely disputed by all factions, with the electors unable to be seated. In 2020, the president was, practically speaking, the only person truly disputing the races that might yet keep Joe Biden from becoming president. But Hayes-Tilden did set up the model for a significant challenge to electors and fluid consequences from such a challenge. Indeed, the Hayes-Tilden challenge highlighted the Rube Goldberg–like weaknesses of the Electoral College system in close races and the intractable mess they might produce. Hayes-Tilden resulted in an epic political horse trade (known as the Compromise of 1877), which gave the presidency to Hayes, the more obvious loser, and ultimately resulted in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, another convoluted reinterpretation of Electoral College procedures, one that now governed the 2020 election. More than suggesting any precise path relevant to 2020, Hayes-Tilden suggested that there could be value and opportunity in chaos, and that widespread charges of fraud could deliver chaos. To the extent that Trump and Giuliani had a plan—and two months in, it was far from clear that they did—creating disorder and confusion seemed the core of it.

January 5, a slogging, gray winter day, forty degrees, rain expected in Washington, DC, and somewhere between thirty-six hours and as much as, if everyone played for highest melodrama, forty-eight hours before Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. would be formally certified as what he was already acknowledged and accepted to be by every aspect of the U.S. government (save for the sitting president) and, for that matter, most people in the world: the next president of the United States.

For Donald John Trump, however, and his advisor Rudolph Giuliani, this was the moment in which Trump forces, galvanized since the election by the belief, on the president’s say-so, that widespread fraud had occurred in the race for the American presidency, would derail the process and recover their victory.

The president had returned the night before from Dalton, Georgia, making a last and begrudging appeal in the Senate runoff election in another rambling speech otherwise focused on election grievances and an effort to put more public pressure on Pence.