It was a curiously novel moment in the Trump presidency: the Vice President standing up for himself. Trump aides, marveling at the development, analyzed that, in Pence’s mind, all of Trump’s acting out and offending behavior over four years was on Trump himself—a cover that worked for many Republicans. But taking this action now in the Electoral College count would be on Pence, and he would go down ignominiously in history for it. He had finally, and belatedly, drawn his line in the sand.

By the time the meeting was over, the Pence team came away believing that Eastman had done the best he could to come up with relevant examples that might justify the vice president’s discretion, but that even Eastman was far from convinced and that, in fact, he seemed mostly to concede all the vice president’s points.

Once again, Pence and Short believed they could not have been clearer about their views and about the actions the vice president would take, and those he would not.

The president, however, was yet somehow much less clear, or was merely refusing to accept what was clear.

Trump was up early on January 5, tired from his trip to Georgia the day before, but focused now entirely on what would happen in Congress the next day. Making his calls, he was not so much seeking information as reconfirming his belief that things would happen in such a way, by whatever means, to support his cause—to which he was still counting on the vice president to bend.

Jason Miller was up early, too. He did Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business from campaign HQ, talking about what might happen the next day. Miller’s take with Bartiromo was actually quite a step from the Giuliani-Eastman-Trump line. In effect, Miller described the coming objections to the electoral count as a procedural and symbolic exercise: the idea was to call attention to election fraud and Article II violations and not, by inference, actually overturn the election. Miller tried to coax this into something that sounded reasonable.

Again, as Miller and everybody was aware, nothing was going to happen, and nobody was seriously trying to make it happen. The very process of making something happen had collapsed—to the degree it had ever started.

The continuing effort to pressure state legislators, who were still, in the president’s mind, poised to rise up, had ended with Giuliani’s girlfriend, Maria Ryan, supplying the wrong cell phone number for Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield, which the president then tweeted out—resulting in thousands of calls and texts to an unsuspecting twenty-eight-year-old person named O. Rose, from Petoskey, Michigan, now living in California, who had nothing to do with state politics or Donald Trump and who identified as “they/them.”