In other words, Trump wasn’t to blame because Trump was Trump, but Rudy was to blame because Rudy was Rudy.

Rudy had two strategic paths to victory. In fact, there were no paths to victory, but Giuliani kept hotly outlining his two-pronged attack: They would go through the state legislatures, where they would present their evidence and where Republican legislators would throw out the Biden electors and send Trump electors to Washington (the actual procedures and precedents for this being nonexistent). Or: federal courts, acting under Article II of the Constitution, which gives the power of regulating each state’s elections to the state legislature (and only to the state legislature, which now became the Trump legal team’s rallying cry), would throw out millions of votes where decisions had been made by election officials instead of the state legislatures.

In Giuliani’s analysis, the Supreme Court was their true ace in the hole. It was simple: the Trump administration, with its three appointments, had a lock on the Court.

“In our pocket,” Trump now repeatedly said.

“We’ll win when we get to the Court,” Rudy repeated, steadfast and, to most others, harebrained in his confidence.

Since the first days of the administration, personal loyalty had been a consistent theme in the Supreme Court nominees presented to Trump: here were judges who would be on his side. It was his litmus test: Will they support me? The Federalist Society and the White House Counsel’s Office, which proposed nominees and coordinated the confirmation process, walked a fine line between support for conservative views and support directly for Trump. Trump, without interest in the Court or much (or any) background in its traditions, found it easy to believe the Court was wholly stacked in his favor, and when push came to shove, would surely have his back. “We’ve got the Supremes,” Trump assured various of his callers.

The old Rudy—Rudy the Justice Department hand, Rudy the prosecutor, Rudy the occasionally diligent student of government—would have known that even a stacked Court was going to go out of its way not to cast its fate with this mess, this crazytown mess, that the rule of institutional self-protection would surely win out. But Giuliani was now unequivocal that this was a certain path. Giuliani might not have argued in court in thirty years, but he had come out of his television defense of the president during the Mueller investigation—even in Trump’s characterization, “playing a lawyer on television”—with new confidence in the power of his own posturing and aggressiveness. The Supreme Court would play its part in the Trump drama. He described what he had come to see as an inevitable decision in their favor as “the ultimate showstopper.”