The vice president was expected for his regular weekly lunch with the president. These were occasions pushed by the vice president and his office. It was part of Pence’s disciplined plan to stay in the president’s immediate circle, understanding that if you weren’t within the immediate sound-of-his-voice circle you were far out of it. For the past four years, Pence had made a point of calling the president one or more times a day and to be in as many Oval Office meetings as possible—often several meetings in a day. The lunches were specifically meant to be an opportunity for Pence to tell the president exactly how hard he was working for him. He usually got ten minutes to do this before Trump snapped on the television and launched into his current list of grievances.

But today’s lunch was shifted to a meeting at 2 p.m.—this was to be a calling on the carpet.

By the afternoon of January 5, with turnout reports from the run-off election in Georgia looking unpromising and with thousands of people arriving in the capital, the president, no matter how unambiguous the signals from the VP’s office, more of them every day, was yet singularly focused in his belief that the vice president should and would do what he, Trump, had now righteously codified as “the right thing.”

“He’s got to do the right thing. He’s going to do the right thing.” He used the term with everyone. Before their meeting, the president tweeted: “The vice president has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.”

Rudy, in turn, was telling everyone that they knew exactly what was going to happen. They could depend on Pence, no question at all about that. If he didn’t immediately upset the election and certify Donald John Trump as the next president—still their first hope—he would at least send four slates back to their respective legislatures for further consideration. Those electors, determined to have been elected by fraudulent means, would then be replaced with Trump electors, who would return to Washington within a week to ten days, tops, where Donald Trump would be certified as the winner and sworn in on January 20.

The vice president arrived for his meeting in the Oval Office, in a rare departure absent its usual constant ebb and flow of traffic.

It was just the president and vice president alone together.

The vice president was still trying to be positive about the Georgia Senate races.

The president was wrathful about McConnell’s unwillingness to back “Trump’s two-thousand-dollar stimulus.”

Neither man spoke about the tens of thousands of people coming into the city.

The president, with his certain sort of ADD imperiousness (impatience mixed with certainty, and not wanting to hear differently), swiftly got to the matter of Pence doing the right thing.

“You want to do the right thing,” said the president.