He had to say something. They had to go public.

Everybody left the Residence and headed with the president to the Green Room, one of the formal parlors on the first floor, to get ready for a speech—some sort of speech. Trump started rambling, with aides trying to get his words down. It wasn’t so much a victory speech, which Giuliani was urging him to give, as an ongoing list of Trump grievances. Indeed, the script would stay remarkably consistent in the coming weeks, filled with random numbers that he had been informed of at some point in the evening and an impressionistic math that proved what he wanted it to prove. There was an effort to talk him down from his dark mood. If he was going to go out there, he should rally the troops, shouldn’t he? Let’s project optimism! But he had gone into a bad place.

At 2:30 a.m., Trump, with his wife, and followed by the vice president and his wife, came out and delivered a petulant, rambling, defensive, wounded cap to the evening—demanding, sore-loser style, that vote counting be stopped, with the final tally being an Election Day tally, while he was still ahead.