At any rate, the upshot of what was, in theory, for Trump, the most important meeting of his presidency was, as the Vice President’s Office would shortly leak to the New York Times in a story posted later that evening, that Pence had conveyed to the president his belief that he did not have the authority to interfere with or challenge the Electoral College vote count.

The president, for his part, immediately issued a statement directly contradicting the vice president:

The New York Times report regarding comments Vice President Pence supposedly made to me today is fake news. He never said that. The Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.

So … either the vice president or the president was lying.

Some White House aides, however much they were familiar with the president’s uncomplicated willingness to dissemble, found him apparently certain that the vice president was fully on board, believing this, generously, to be a product of the vice president’s comity and the president’s conviction or, more pathologically the president’s ability to exclude any other views and every other person from his thinking.

The vice president’s side flatly rejected this view. Rather, the VP’s people found the president so confident in the power of his persuasion and threats that he steadfastly believed that a campaign to pressure the vice president—via insistence, humiliation, specious arguments, warnings about a break in their relationship, and, in this last instance, straightforward gaslighting—would get him what he wanted.

Some fifteen minutes after the president’s statement went out at about 9:30, an angry Marc Short called Jason Miller.

“I’m just curious about what the process is for issuing a statement about a conversation when there were only two people in the room.”

“Well,” said Miller, “POTUS tells me what he wants to say, and I put it out.”

9

MORNING, JANUARY 6

By dawn, the crowd was building, the various organizers of the various events pulling in larger-than-expected numbers. But the protest was still just background noise, a tailgate party before the main event, the counting of the electors, which would begin at 1 p.m.—the main non-event more accurately.

The remaining on-call group of aides around the president that morning in the White House was down to Meadows, Herschmann, and Scavino, with Miller, Justin Clark, Alex Cannon, and Tim Murtaugh the last employees from the campaign, either working from home, or, in the case of Clark, heading to an RNC winter meeting in Florida. All of them had woken up with something close to the same thought: How is it going to play when the vice president fails to make the move the president is counting on him to make? And make no mistake, each fully understood Mike Pence was not going to make that move.