Marc Short had just gotten his cheeseburger when he became aware of the crowds and Capitol Police. Against people pushing downstairs to exit the building, he made his way upstairs, in touch with the VP’s Secret Service detail, reaching Pence and his family—his wife, Karen, and daughter Charlotte and brother Greg—in the ceremonial office that the vice president, as president of the Senate, maintains just off the Senate Chamber. The Secret Service pressed for an evacuation but the vice president resisted. The Secret Service then tried to move the vice president and his family to the protected motorcade where they could wait. The vice president understood that the car could then depart at will and that would be the lasting impression: a fleeing vice president. They settled for a retreat to a “secure location”—a secret fortified shelter—within the Capitol.

At about 2:15 p.m., Boris Epshteyn, watching television in Giuliani’s suite at the Willard, was one of the first people in the greater Trump circle to start, with some sense of panic, to flag what was occurring. Epshteyn spoke to Miller, who called Meadows.

“I’m sure you’re tracking this,” Miller said.

“Yeah, I know. Some things are moving here that I can’t get into at the moment…” Meadows said.

Miller assumed the White House was mobilizing the National Guard. At 2:20 p.m., both the House and Senate adjourned.

At 2:24 p.m., the president, having been informed that Mike Pence had not rejected the Arizona Biden electors, tweeted:

Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!

Reading the tweet in the Capitol bunker, the siege now in progress, Pence and Short, hardly for the first time, noted how far off the president could be from the page that everyone else was on. That was the generous interpretation.

In part, the president seemed just not to be grasping the facts as they were coming through—mounting crowds, breached barricades, protestors entering the Capitol. Or maybe he was simply disagreeing with them: These people were protesting the election, he was still repeating as late as 2:30. The protestors wanted Pence to do the right thing. These were good protestors, his protestors.

Indeed, one of the novel aspects of the breach of the Capitol was that it was filmed by so many of the protestors. This would become a subtheme to later Republican revisionism that these were just tourists, people participating in the democratic process, run amok.

“We’re in! We’re in!” one man with a camera shouts, as the barriers fall.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, are suddenly swarming the Capitol, with a voice on the video shouting: “Let’s go, let’s go.”