Our media is not free. It’s not fair. It suppresses thought. It suppresses speech, and it’s become the enemy of the people. It’s become the enemy of the people. It’s the biggest problem we have in this country. No third world countries would even attempt to do what we caught them doing, and you’ll hear about that in just a few minutes.

His delivery was more singsong than bombastic and explosive. He was rushing through it. Ordinarily, he’d have thrown some red meat out and waited for the reaction—always, clearly, the moments of his keenest enjoyment—but now he was just plunging forward.

Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer, and we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. We’re going to have to fight much harder, and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. If he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country, because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution. Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. After this, we’re going to walk down—and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

He added that part: the walk. After this, we’re going to walk down—and I’ll be there with you. The walk wasn’t in the text. The entourage heard little else—the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of Trump rallies that they all had been subjected to blurred into the usual blah-blah, but they heard that line: the walk. He did not mean this, of course. Trump didn’t walk anywhere. The we was figurative. Still.

What was most different about this speech was that he was making a case, prosecuting an argument. Trump rally riffs ordinarily mixed the familiar with sudden bursts of new material—insults, sweeping generalizations about good guys and bad guys, patriotic this-and-that. But now he was his own lawyer. The election had been stolen, and this was how they did it.