And on:

“So, first of all, COVID changed the whole ball game, but I still got seventy-five million votes. Remember, I got sixty-three. I was supposed to get sixty-six, and I couldn’t lose. I got seventy-five—I got almost seventy-five million votes and probably a lot more than that. But I got almost seventy-five million votes. We were aiming at sixty-six million votes. And we had a tremendous turnout, far bigger than the other side thought possible. That’s why they closed the votes. That’s why they had hours of something—something went on. Because when they came back, all of sudden: What happened? Where did all of these votes come from? It was a crooked, rigged election. When I made the speech two weeks ago”—his CPAC speech—“which, by the way, had thirty-one million people online. You saw that, right? I mean, the numbers were phenomenal. And it was just about the number one show on television for the week, and it was at five o’clock on a Sunday on cable and it was beating, you know, network television. But we had thirty-one million online. A big part of that is the voter fraud. People, they’re not accepting it. They’re not accepting it. It’s very interesting. When you had the people—when you had the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken in front of was down in Washington on the sixth. That was—so you can say it was a million people. Some people say more; some people say less. But that was a crowd that went to the Washington Monument. That was a massive crowd. And a lot of those people were there—I think most of those people were there because of the voter fraud. It was a fraudulent election.”

It is not just a sense of grievance, or arguing a political flip side, but of steeping into a fully built alternate world. This is perhaps its appeal. He isn’t really arguing issues; you don’t have to parse the facts. You can walk through the door of an entirely realized, albeit parallel universe.

“Who do you think was in control of this, the real bad guys?” I asked.