A few days before, rally organizers had amended their estimate of the crowd size from 5,000 to 30,000. Various media reports were now putting the size of the crowd at more than 10,000. The president paused during his speech to observe that he reckoned there were 250,000 people. Best estimate put the crowd somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000—still a righteous cold-weather turnout for a defeated president.

In days to come, the president would raise his estimate to 1 million.

He came onstage to his standard anthem, “God Bless the U.S.A.,” but with less swagger than usual—slower, less sure, even. He was in a black overcoat and black gloves—a strongman look.

The speech, shortly on its way to becoming the most notorious of his presidency, and the key evidence for his imminent second impeachment, was a B delivery. You could imagine that his mind would have been rightly on the vice president; whatever he said here was irrelevant compared to that.

The speech was cued up on the teleprompter. The president read most of it, a sign of disengagement.

It was boiler-plate stuff. The media is the biggest problem we have, as far as I’m concerned, single-biggest problem, the fake news and the Big Tech …

Large parts rehashing his campaign rally script:

Turn your cameras, please, and show what’s really happening out here, because these people are not going to take it any longer. They’re not going to take it any longer. Go ahead. Turn your cameras, please. Would you show?… I wish they’d flip those cameras and look behind you. That is the most amazing sight. When they make a mistake, you get to see it on television. Amazing, amazing, all the way back. Don’t worry. We will not take the name off the Washington Monument. We will not. Cancel culture. They wanted to get rid of the Jefferson Memorial, either take it down or just put somebody else in there. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It damn well better not. Although, with this administration, if this happens, it could happen. You’ll see some really bad things happen.

In a way, by this point, his unscripted speeches had become so scripted that the true eccentricities and frisson and nutty or inspiring free association were all smoothed out of it. Perhaps he was tired. Even Trump might finally become tired of hearing himself talk; it was possible. Or tired of the sixty days of tension; of keeping something in the air long, long after it should reasonably have crashed, something that now, in the next few hours, was about to come to an end.

Not long into the speech, Giuliani and his crew, with freezing toes, left and went back to the Willard. They had heard it all before.