“Do we have clear t[alking]p[oint]s on the VP role tomorrow? Just a few topline would be helpful,” one of the aides in the campaign communications office plaintively wrote Boris Epshteyn, the go-between to Rudy’s people, less than a day before the most consequential showdown in modern democracy was to take place.

Epshteyn fudged, supplying talking points vague enough as to be almost meaningless:

• The VP has a significant constitutional role at the Joint Session under the Twelfth Amendment;
• The key is the interplay between the Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act;
• In the end, the Constitution controls the process of the selection of the next president.

After more coaxing, Epshteyn finally forwarded over a collection of Giuliani’s largely unsourced numbers and a copy of the report prepared by Peter Navarro.

This comprised the effort to manage and lobby Congress.

As sure as the sun would rise, Congress would certify Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. So, for Trump and Giuliani, this was either an attention-grabbing last hurrah—both men would of course do almost anything for attention—or part of a kind of elaborate charade of saving face and creating a historic political martyrdom. Or—and this was the “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation that most political professionals were steadfastly trying not to acknowledge—it was mental derangement of a kind and at an intensity never before known at the highest level of the U.S. government.

Almost everyone who remained around the president understood that he, along with Rudy, did in fact actually believe that there was yet a decent chance of upsetting the electoral count and having Trump declared the Electoral College winner or, failing that, prolonging the election and returning the fight to the disputed states. The president’s aides (and family) understood, too, that he was the only one (granted, along with Rudy, which only made the situation more alarming) in any professional political sphere to believe this. Hence, although they did not call it such, and tried to see it as more nuanced, derangement.

This derangement was certainly encouraged by the various members of Congress and the Senate who were saying they would participate in the melodrama—for their own attention-getting or symbolic reasons. It was not, though, shared by them. No one in Congress, not even among the most spirited or yobbish of the Dead-Enders, actually believed there was any imaginable chance that certification would be delayed (at least for more than a few hours) and that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. would not be the president of the United States in fifteen days.

To the same degree that Republicans were rushing to line up with the president, many seemed to rush to assure colleagues that they, personally, thought it was all, well, nuts.