At the same time, this derangement was evidently shared by many of the groups and individuals converging on Washington for the next day’s protest. Here was yet another inexplicable divide between the political class and the people who had elected them. It was also another demonstration of Trump’s almost otherworldly connection to the latter, a connection at the heart of this very derangement. Trump and his people—“my people”—believed.

Still, the protests, along with the arrival throughout the day of the vast and devoted throng, however reaffirming to Trump, was only a sideshow to the main event in Congress, which was receiving all his attention.

There was hardly a waking hour in the past forty-eight during which he and Giuliani had not been on the phone in pent-up nervousness and excitement over the coming battle in Congress on January 6. They were two generals poring over a map of the battlefield.

At the same time, it was noted by all in the White House that the president and his lawyer had in fact no plan for what do if the sun did not rise. There was no script here. No agents in place. No network ready to go. No plan if dog caught car. Neither the president nor his lawyer had any more of a grip on what might happen, given a favorable outcome, than anyone else. Because it absolutely wasn’t going to happen, no one was considering the contingencies if it did.

Still, Hayes-Tilden and the election of 1876 did suggest the possibilities for endless and, for Trump, hopeful complications. For several weeks, Trump had kept asking various lawyers and advisors for a brief on Hayes-Tilden. He did not, though, ever apparently manage to sit through a complete retelling of the complicated tale.

What was likely to happen today, when the electors were counted before Congress, as the Constitution provided—“the President of the Senate shall, in Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the [electoral] Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted”—was that, as the vice president read the vote count for the individual states, there would be objections to the tallies in at least four and as many as seven states. These included Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and possibly Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico. The fact that no one actually knew how many was just another aspect of the disarray.