And more immediately, there was the Georgia run-off election, with the counting from the day before only just finishing, and what now looked like the loss of the Senate. When Jason Miller spoke to the president at 8 a.m., he was looking for a reaction to that loss. As was their usual routine, the president, who had seen that morning’s coverage, asked Miller to recap it. Who was getting blamed?

“It’s all about the two thousand dollars—if Mitch had just cut those checks. Do people get this? The Dems’ closing ads were all about those checks,” the president rehashed. He asked Miller what he thought Pence would do, and then told Miller that Pence would do the right thing. While on the phone with Miller, the president, watching Chuck Todd on NBC, tweeted: “Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd is so happy with the fake voter tabulation process that he can’t even get the words out straight. Sad to watch!”

Getting off the phone with Miller, the president then tweeted at 8:17 a.m. his now-precise theory of how he saw the election being overturned: “States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the states. AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”

The president continued to tweet, both about the Georgia election, the stolen presidential election, and the importance to the Republican Party in having him as president.

As the crowd began gathering at the Ellipse for the main rally—ten thousand to twenty thousand people there at this point—the president called the vice president again. A resigned, or stoic, Meadows was in the room. The president reached Pence at his residence where he was with Marc Short and their lawyer Greg Jacob and other staff members. They were trying to finish the vice president’s statement that, in effect, would reject all of the president’s views and desires about the vice president’s power and prerogatives. But the president was now calling to restate those views anyway. It was among the most frustrating aspects of dealing with Trump. It was the very opposite of the Socratic approach, but in some sense Trump’s personal version of it: merely by repeating, often word for word, what he had said sometimes countless times before he would lead you to, or bludgeon you into accepting, his position. The repetition was almost verbatim—Jefferson, patriot and pussy, right thing—but the tone, uncompromising the day before, was now even harsher, more scathing.