True, hardly anybody was left in the White House. Still, even in the waning days of a presidency, such were the theoretical stakes that the greater Trump alumni and allies might reasonably have been brought back into action. This had not happened—rather, the opposite: even the longtime loyalists had all fled and were unreachable.

Kushner—among the key Hill contacts in the White House for the congressional leadership and the person most consistently able to efficiently mobilize White House resources, at least to the extent that anyone could—was almost entirely out of pocket on his flight back from the Middle East.

There was Rudy, of course. But the remaining insiders, most trying to keep as much distance as possible from the White House, understood that Rudy had few relationships with congressional members, and the ones he had were bad. The White House, while hanging everything on what would happen in Congress, was as remote from Capitol Hill and as disengaged with the process there as it had ever been.

To the extent, as the media darkly warned, that there was an extraordinary plot to hold on to power—an incipient coup, even—there really were only two plotters and no one to back them up. Trump had no functioning political staff, the White House Counsel’s Office had been all but shut down (to the degree the office was functioning, it was almost entirely focused on vetting pardon pleas), and the leadership of the Justice Department was in disarray.

All the same, the president and Rudy, in their bubble world, remained confident that success was there for them to grab.

At 1:49 p.m. the president retweeted a video of his Ellipse speech. At just about this time, rioters were breaching the Capitol door.

At two o’clock, the president and Giuliani—the president in the White House and Giuliani at the Willard—tried to find Tommy Tuberville, the recently seated senator from Alabama, but they instead mistakenly called Mike Lee, the Utah senator, on his cell phone. Lee, in the increasing confusion as reports started to come in of mobs breaching the Capitol fences, found Tuberville and put him on the phone. The president and Giuliani seemed to have no idea what was occurring at the Capitol, and Tuberville was either unsuccessful in telling them or thought better of trying.

At 2:11 p.m., the New York Times reported that rioters had entered the Capitol.

At 2:13 p.m., the vice president was pulled from the Senate Floor.