“This looks terrible. This is really bad. Who are these people? These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits. They look like Democrats. Hold on, our great First Lady is here,” said Trump, switching to speakerphone—his overblown public language seemingly his private language, too. (He did not necessarily reserve “great” for only the First Lady but often applied it to whomever he was with.)

“Jason,” said the great First Lady with a sharp note. “The media is trying to go and say this is who we are. We don’t support this.”

“That’s what we have to make clear,” said Miller, relieved that the president and First Lady were seeing the protestors as bad guys rather than good guys (and not a mix of the two). Pushing through, Miller told the president and First Lady that he had just gotten off the phone with Kushner and Meadows and that they had a proposal for later that evening if Biden reached an electoral majority. He went into reading the statement draft.

The president suggested “peaceful” transition instead of “orderly.” Miller said that that called attention to the fact that it wasn’t peaceful now and might not be peaceful. “Orderly,” Miller did not say, suggested not just an absence of disruption, but that all the aspects of government would pass, as they should, to a new administration. “Peaceful” put it in someone else’s hand; “orderly” meant cooperation, too—the Trump White House would cooperate with the incoming Biden White House. It wasn’t just the protestors who needed to stop; Trump needed to extend himself, too. After all, it wasn’t just the recount effort and the election challenge behind the protests, but Trump’s personal intransigence.

Trump seemed to appreciate this now, to walk back, even. “The media thinks I’m not going to leave,” said the president. “Do they really think that? That’s crazy.”

“We’ve never laid that out,” said Miller, with some deadpan, adding, “I really can’t stress enough how much we have to make it clear that we’re fully on board with an orderly transition.”

“We didn’t tell people to do something like this. We told people to be peaceful. I even said ‘peaceful’ and ‘patriotic’ in my speech!”

“Exactly.” Miller took note that there weren’t the usual peaks and valleys of a conversation with Trump—the declaiming insistence on whatever point he was insisting on and the digressions to something off point.

“I’ll work with Dan on getting this out,” Miller told the president. Saying this, Miller suddenly wondered if they would even have the tools and channels to get it out.

Miller immediately reached a furious Scavino. “They are shutting us down. They are not letting us on. We’re being deplatformed. They are completely deplatforming the president of the United States. They don’t want him to say anything ever again.” Facebook had pushed the president off at 8:36 p.m.