What the vice president was going to do in Congress—the right thing or not—was at top of mind. In the many times he had already spoken to Rudy that day, the rally—at which, the next day, Rudy would also speak—had not come up more than in passing. The farther, though at some distance, item on his mind was the Georgia run-off election and how, if it went badly—and it seemed to be going badly—he could shift the blame where it belonged. This was another refrain he played all day: if McConnell had only supported his two-thousand-dollar stimulus check idea—he rendered this in the third person: “Trump’s two-thousand-dollar stimulus check”—they would have won in Georgia.

“Fucking Mitch … even a dummy can figure it out … he’s trying to lose … I don’t think he wants to win … he wants to lose these seats … dumbest thing I’ve ever seen … these people are so stupid … Dems do a much better job of sticking together … run circles around the Republicans … dumbest thing I’ve ever seen…”

But Georgia was certainly not as important as what the vice president would do; nor as important as the final plans for how to get the vice president to do what he needed to do.

Ross Worthington and Vince Haley, on Stephen Miller’s speechwriting staff, were drafting the president’s remarks for the next day’s rally, but they were having trouble getting Trump’s attention. Miller himself, following the birth of his first child, had been another largely absent presence for many weeks. Neither Worthington nor Haley sensed that the rally was on anyone’s main radar. For them, it was both a sentimental effort, the president’s last rally, and a whistling-past-the-graveyard exercise. The brief was just to use Rudy’s stuff to make the election case.

Trump had, starting weeks before, continued to nod to the event in a series of tweets: “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” But this was not a White House event. Even if they had wanted to, there was no one in these final days in the White House capable of organizing a major rally or even coordinating with anyone who was. And the president was always halfhearted at best when he wasn’t in control of an appearance—meaning the look and feel, the staging and the lighting, and the run of show would be off, you could guarantee. (Nick Luna, his body man, had once doubled up the number of flags behind Trump on the stage, at the expense of people standing behind him, on the assumption that flags looked presidential. “I’ll tell you what looks presidential,” remonstrated the president. “People standing behind me cheering.”)