The person he did have, Rudy Giuliani, was drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania, over maintaining the president’s favor by doing his bidding and feeding his obsession.

It really was one of those what-if moments. Not: what if the president of the United States were revealed to be an evil despot, moving the nation to the type of fascistic dictatorship hotly anticipated by MSNBC. But, rather: what if, stripping all protection and artifice away, he were revealed to be incapable of separating the fantasy of what he believed possible from the practicalities of accomplishing it? Indeed, aides noted that, on the eve of a consequential legislative battle, the White House would ordinarily have been burning up the phones, but Giuliani, in effect the president’s singular operative, barely had contact information for most people on the Hill.

The good news here is that the irrational president could actually not accomplish anything very much. He was just one man, without a plan, nor with much knowledge of how the government worked, whose staff had almost entirely deserted him. The bad news was that his fantasy, given his self-dramatization and moral authority, as it were, with his base, was now shared by millions of people.

For most politicians, vox populi is a pretty remote concept, one brought home only with polling, press, and elections. Trump’s regular and, during some periods, nearly constant performances at stadium rallies gave him a greater direct route and connection to his base than any politician in the modern television age. It was a fan base of adulation on a par with that of a pop star—a massive pop star. (“The only man without a guitar who can fill a stadium,” he liked to say about himself, in one of his 1960s-stuck references.) Unlike most politicians, who polled for the most effective issues and the cleverest nuances in wording, Trump, in his hours of dominating stadium stages, surveyed the audience in an emotional real time. He threw out gambit after gambit, line after line, calibrating the response. And when he hit the note, the magical note—Obama’s birth certificate, the wall, taking a knee, fake news, and now the stolen election—he repeated it again and again, with there being little light between what he most believed and what most moved the crowd.

He took his legitimacy from these rallies and the crowd’s febrile response. He knew he would win the election, and he would believe he had won the election, not least of all because the rallies, four or five a day in the week before the election, had been so beyond anything the Democrats and Joe Biden could ever in their wildest dreams have mustered. And they were happening during the pandemic!