It was a hothouse conversation—the two true believers in a deep dive into what no one else believed. Meadows, one of the last remaining West Wing officials still at work, was staying clear of whatever the president and Giuliani were plotting. Kushner was, to his own great relief, in the Middle East, wrapping up what he saw as his historic mission, his peace deals—this last one with the Qataris—and was not scheduled to return until the following day. The president had all but banished the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone (who was grateful to be banished), and was speaking instead to Herschmann. Herschmann, believing he understood how to move the president, tended to offer objections that sounded awfully like the plaudits of a yes-man. Kayleigh McEnany had been strategically missing in action for several weeks. The remaining campaign officials (Miller, Justin Clark, Alex Cannon) tended to be merely on the receiving end of Trump’s calls and opinions. And everybody else was, effectively, cleared out.

White House wags noted that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had fled as far as Sudan—where he was negotiating a good-behavior economic pact with the former terrorism-sponsor nation—to get distance from this last election gasp.

“There is no question, none at all, that the VP can do this. That’s a fact. The Constitution gives him the authority not to certify. It goes back to the state legislatures,” said Giuliani, as though on a loop. He kept repeating this to the president and to the others who were part of the continual conversation on his cell phone. (“Yes … yes … yes … here’s the thing … hold on a second … hey, let me get back to you…”)

The president, in his own loop, kept similarly repeating this back to Giuliani.

And they both similarly repeated this to everyone else with such insistent and repetitive determination that it overrode any opportunity to disagree with them or in any way even to engage in the conversation. There it was: the vice president could, and Trump and Giuliani believed likely would, defy all precedent, all available advice, as well as his stated position, and upend his own career to nullify the election. Truly.

About this, they continued to weigh the odds that the vice president would come along: sometimes fifty-fifty, sometimes as much as sixty-forty, even somewhat more. At the grimmest, thirty-seventy. But always a solid shot.

That this had no basis at all in sense or reality—no one in the U.S. government (no one anywhere in the government) regarding this as having any chance at all of happening, literally a zero-chance shot—contributed to letting the two men persist in their delusion. Why interfere with their delusion if it was a pointless one? Their delusion would change nothing. And why interfere if neither the president nor his primary advisor was going to listen anyway?