At 9 a.m., Mo Brooks, the congressman from Alabama, one of the Dead-Enders leading the House push to challenge the electoral count, gave an early speech at the Ellipse, just in back of the White House where the main rally was now in progress. Brooks judged it to be a happy crowd, more interested in the music than in his speech about the “Steal,” and already large enough that he felt he had to yell into the microphone.

At 9:30 a.m., Miller received the text of the president’s planned speech at the rally, but he didn’t read it. Miller was still focused on the coming electoral count. His concern was about getting coverage of the breakout sessions, when both the Senate and the House would return to their respective chambers. Would the networks cover the House and Senate debates over the challenges to the various states? That would offer some satisfaction to the president.

When Miller and the president spoke again, shortly after nine thirty, the president continued the conversation about the great fraud and the importance of the vice president’s doing the right thing and of, in general, the need to fight back against the effort to steal the election from him. What else, he wondered, could be done with the House and Senate members? They needed to be more emphatic about the steal. What were the cases they were going to be highlighting during the breakout sessions? They should be presenting the big stuff—the big frauds. In fact, the president and his legal team had little idea of what was going to happen in the arguments before Congress. Nobody was in the loop.

He was curious about the mounting crowd. How was it looking? How big was it?

It seemed to be a really big crowd, Miller told him, and getting bigger.

Miller still saw no pressing reason to read the president’s speech, not just because, in front of a crowd, Trump would likely depart from it, but because, at this point, rallies were largely a set piece: he’d do his thing—probably for his last time as president.

The family arrived at the White House shortly before 10 a.m. Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric and Lara, and Ivanka, on her own—Jared was on his way back from the Middle East. It was a good-feeling gathering, even a bit of a party. The president might still be dug in but his family was moving on—and wanting to acknowledge this most remarkable four years they had experienced. No regrets. Come on … who would have expected any of this!