The vice president and his chief of staff were trying. Even as the president continued to hector or shame or insult the vice president into capitulating to his effective putsch, the VP and his staff were at work on a no-wiggle-room statement that would carefully explain the vice president’s position and foreclose any action on his part. They planned to release the statement just before Congress convened at 1 p.m.

So, what was going to happen when it didn’t happen? When the VP did nothing more than count the votes?

There were many Democrats and pundits contemplating, even looking forward with some schadenfreude, to the president’s attempting to stay on in the White House after January 20 and having to be frog-marched out by the Secret Service. Equally, there were far-right-wingers and kamikaze Trumpers looking forward to their version of a last stand. But the six remaining men closest to the situation were all purposely trying not to think about the last two weeks of the Trump presidency and what “weird shit”—in the words of one of the men, echoing George W. Bush’s characterization of Trump’s inaugural address of four years before—could take place.

At the moment, they were focused on how this would break—this is, whether the president would break when the vice president crossed him.

While there were not unknowns as to the ultimate outcome, there were unknowns in the day itself that could well contribute to how the president might respond to this final, incontestable crossing of the threshold of his election loss.

For one thing, with objections by House and Senate members, it could go on for hours and hours, through the day, the night, and into tomorrow—the outcome might be known, but the suspense, independent of reality, could build mightily anyway.

And there were people in the streets. While the absolute certainty of what was going to take place was understood by every political professional on that day in Washington, except for the president (and Rudy), it was not understood by the crowd, who seemed perfectly willing to suspend all disbelief about the stolen election. This was another variable to the six men: not, at that point, that the crowd would itself be a player, but that the presence of the crowd would further convince Trump that the day would be his; not, in other words, that he would incite the crowd but that the crowd would incite him.

But this was not a sense of climax. The opposite: anticlimax. This had dragged out beyond reason. Clark, for one, was certainly relieved to be getting out of town.