Hence, Trump and Giuliani were left to plan for what the president would say to fortify the vice president in this historic overthrow when Pence was scheduled to arrive for their last meeting.

This all then prompted the question as to the extent and nature of the president’s delusion: How far had he left reality? And to what extent had the government itself become a charade to support his delusion—not that the delusion, mind you, would ever become reality. But the checks and balances of government would not discourage it, either. The president would just simply float, disconnected, out there.

There was the world within shouting distance of the Oval Office—privy to the president’s monologues, catalogue of resentments, agitation, desires, long-held notions, stray information, and sudden inspirations, with little practical relationship to the workings of government—and then there was the world beyond that. Early in Trump’s presidency, aides noted that a second-floor office, where the likes of Stephen Miller and Kellyanne Conway worked, meant a degree of exclusion but also protection: Trump would never climb the stairs (and by the end of his term, he never had).

The Trump White House, cabinet offices, and agencies may not have been staffed by top policy makers or the most astute of bureaucrats, but most were professional or career-minded enough, save for a few notable instances, to turn Trump’s gut calls, free associations, furious resentments, and wide-ranging balderdash into something that resembled a presentable policy with a legal framework.

The Obi-Wan of this process was, again, most consistently Kushner. While he might absent himself from the fights that he was most clearly going to lose, he was careful to be on the scene when his own interests were at stake and, knowing the nature of Trump’s attention span and impatience with detail, when he could reasonably enough change the thrust and form of his father-in-law’s orders and directions. Kushner’s oft-stated view of his moderating effect on the president—if you thought this was bad, it could have been much worse—seemed, considering how bad it was, to be an odd stretch of self-congratulation, and yet it was probably true.

Kushner and his wife were still trying to keep their people around the president, and were certainly receiving hourly reports from them. But at the same time, they also seemed clear-eyed as to how little an effect anyone could have on the president at this point, hardened as he was in his irrational beliefs, and they were keeping their distance—indeed, with Kushner now in Doha, seven time zones away.

To the degree that Trump had, for four years, been running the government with scant idea of the rules and practices of running the government, he was doing that now without virtually anybody who did have some idea and desire to protect both him and themselves from embarrassment or legal peril.