Rudy, calling from the Willard, where he had watched the remainder of the president’s speech and was just seeing the first mentions of disorder in the streets, gave him a breathless report on Pence, but without any new information. That said, he was also promising that as many as six states would be contested, hence a volatile situation—we just didn’t know what’s going to happen (his breathlessness was only increasing). Meadows was in close touch with Jim Jordan. But the details Jordan was offering were unsatisfying. Indeed, the various congressional supporters seemed increasingly less excited now that their revolt would be covered only by C-SPAN.

There were initial reports about the crowds amassing at the Capitol, but the television news was mostly not yet registering a threatening sense of disorder. The president was still marveling to people about the size of the crowd, sure that the VP would understand that the base was firmly behind the president.

His focus was very much on what was happening inside the Capitol Building and on what he still believed would, or certainly could, be a radical turn in his fortunes in the coming hours.

Marc Short was standing on the House floor in the back as his boss presided. He had been taking if not congratulations at least sure signs of affirmation from both Republican House and Senate members. These were small gestures over something so large you could not make big gestures—just sighs of relief. What would have been the singular constitutional crisis in the republic’s almost 250 years, averted. Even Mo Brooks, who was leading the ritual objections on the House side, indicated his thumbs up.

When the House and Senate broke to consider the Arizona objection, each in their respective chambers for the obligatory two-hour debate, Short decided to go downstairs to the Capitol grill and get a cheeseburger.

The parliamentary process just commencing represented another anomaly in this highly irregular day. The president was, in theory, waging an extraordinary legislative fight, one with hardly any precedent—the culmination of a two-month battle in which he had considered little else, on which both his immediate future and his place in history depended. But other than via his own tweets and fulminations, and his meeting the day before with the vice president, nobody in the White House was much participating or even present in this fight.

In addition to overseeing the complex and far-flung operations of the executive branch, the White House also manages a political operation whose function is to exert its influence and leverage over the legislative branch. Arguably, the Trump White House performed neither of these functions very well. But at this moment, there was no political function being performed at all.

There was nobody on the White House side whipping votes. There was nobody on the White House side who was even particularly up-to-date on who might be with them or against them other than from public reports.