“I very much want to do the right thing,” said the vice president. “That’s all I want to do.”

The vice president listened to the president recount details of the stolen election—free-form, anecdotal grievances uttered and repeated. Pence didn’t disagree, and he seemed to share or at least sympathize with the president’s plight.

Then the vice president was subjected to the president’s instructions and admonishments about what had to be done about this. Everything the vice president had previously said was ignored, with the president unquestionably assuming the vice president had the certain power to do what the president wanted done and to correct the terrible wrongs as he saw them.

As it always is with Trump, there was no real discussion. There was no response called for except to look like you were listening and to occasionally nod your head. Trump conducted both sides of the conversation.

The president, reverting to a trope he often used about the willingness to fight, talked about the vice president’s heroic place in history if he stood up and did what was right, and the shame of his place if he didn’t.

“Do you want to be Thomas Jefferson?” he asked, going back to Jefferson’s move in the 1801 certification—the argument that Pence had explicitly rejected in his meeting with the president and Giuliani’s constitutional lawyer, John Eastman, the night before.

Trump pressed further, in a line he would leak straightaway and that he would be repeating for months to come: “Do you want to be a patriot or pussy?” (The New York Times made this somewhat grander: “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.”)

Pence, not rising to the bait, repeated that, in the overwhelming opinion of those constitutional experts he had consulted, the Constitution did not give him the authority to do what the president thought he could do. This would have been the point he had made to the president, without deviation, almost countless times, which Trump seemed to force him to make again in something like a police interrogation, hoping he might somehow, in making him repeat what he had said so many times before, catch him up on the details.

It is also likely that Trump wasn’t listening. He often remarked about Pence that the vice president beat around the bush and had a hard time getting to the point.

Trump returned to talking about the “right thing,” and an eager-to-mollify Pence returned to his own support for doing the “right thing.”