In one sense, perhaps, you could argue that this was an indication of the president’s strength and influence. He could say things, tweet something, and a movement would happen—or, at least, ad hoc forces would take up the mantle. But the downside here was that most of the measures were taken to please the president or to garner press for whoever was staking the new claim and were disconnected from the need to accomplish anything. It was a world of local self-promoters.

Several state attorneys general pitched a new approach. The concept went that if one state’s “fraud” or bad election practices changed the outcome of the presidential race, this harmed other states, who could then sue the offending state. But this needed a goodly number of attorneys general of friendly states to get on board what was (by any estimation) a long-reach if not ridiculous legal theory. The theory, or variation of the theory, went through a series of drafts. The initial efforts getting little buy-in—indeed, several of the attorneys general thought they might be “sanctionable,” that is, so ludicrous or far afield that the courts might punish the lawyers who brought the suits.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, beset by a slew of legal problems of his own (an indictment for securities fraud before taking office and accusations of bribery while in office) and therefore eager to curry favor with Trump, agreed to be the lead plaintiff. Texas would sue Pennsylvania for unfairly helping to defeat Donald Trump. The Texas suit, as soon as it was filed, was joined by seventeen other Republican AGs, almost all of them dubious about the merits, but all of them wary of a stinging tweet in their direction from the president, and conscious of the points it would win them (with at least five of them getting a personal pitch, with signature flattery and threat, from Trump himself).

“Once it was filed it was impossible not to join,” noted one of the AGs, explaining to his staff why he had signed on. “We’d invite a tsunami of problems if we didn’t.”

Such “support,” along with Giuliani’s certainty that this would absolutely succeed, served to convince the president that he had a winning hand, that in fact the Texas lawsuit, quite on the outer edges of harebrained, was another ace-in-the-hole case before their ace-in-the-hole Supreme Court.

This was now the pattern: pay no attention to lost lawsuits and just file new ones. Indeed, part of the grand circular point here was that the president’s confidence was maintained by local lawyers and politicians eager to curry his favor by jumping into the election fight without regard for the ultimate outcome of these battles. They all might have been far from convinced that there could be any positive outcome, but they were nevertheless ever willing to please Trump—and possibly to get on television in the process—which, in turn, fortified his certainty and confidence.