At the same time, the rally was happening, organized by the White House or not. If anyone had been paying attention (Trump and Giuliani, anyone else in the White House, Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell), it should have been clear that this had the makings of a shit show, particularly with the December 12 rally just a few weeks ago as a living example.

The Washington Post outlined in quite extensive detail what was going to happen on January 6, although this was played as a local story, and you had to scroll pretty far down to find it. There would be four different rallies on the sixth, the Post reported, each with different organizers, each set to protest the election results and to demand an overturn of the Electoral College vote. Key gathering points would be the Washington Monument, Freedom Plaza, and the Capitol.

There was Women for America First, a group associated with the Kremer mother-daughter duo. There was something, said the Post, called the Wild Protest, slated for the Capitol lawn. A Trump supporter named James Epley, unknown to the White House, had filed an application to march from the Mall to the Capitol. A breakaway member of Women for America First, Cindy Chafian, had asked for her own permit for an organization called the Eighty Percent Coalition—some polls had nearly that many Republicans saying they didn’t trust the election results—for a venue near the Washington Monument.

Said the Post:

… online forums and encrypted chat messages among far-right groups indicate a number of demonstrators might be planning more than chanting and waving signs.

Threats of violence, ploys to smuggle guns into the District and calls to set up an “armed encampment” on the Mall have proliferated in online chats about the Jan. 6 day of protest. The Proud Boys, members of armed right-wing groups, conspiracy theorists and white supremacists have pledged to attend.

For Trump, and for everybody who had grown used to him, this was in some sense just more of the same—here was the impassioned, quirky, voluble, “a bit too crazy,” great unwashed group that had filled his stadiums. For Trump, these people were the background to his main event. They were props for him. They were not the story. He was the story.

The main event, his main event, even if only in his imagination, was for Biden’s electors not to be certified and to instead be replaced by Trump electors; or, at least, for Biden’s electors to be sent back to their respective state legislatures.

The main event for nearly everybody in the U.S. government was also this ritual count, but to get that done and to have all this over with—no more so than for the people left in the White House, who were exhausted, and filled with no small amount of personal embarrassment by the election fight, and who wanted to move on.