Michael Wolff writes:

To the degree that Trump had, for four years, been running the government with scant idea of the rules and practices of running the government, he was now doing it virtually without anybody who did have some idea and desire to protect both him and themselves from embarrassment or legal peril. Jared Kushner was, to his own great relief, in the Middle East, wrapping up what he saw as his historic mission: his peace deals. The president had all but banished the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone (who was grateful to be banished), and was speaking instead to Herschmann. Herschmann, believing he understood how to move the president, tended to offer objections that sounded awfully like the plaudits of a yes-man. Kayleigh McEnany had been strategically missing in action for several weeks. The remaining campaign officials (Jason Miller, Clark, Cannon) tended to be merely on the receiving end of Trump’s calls and opinions. And everybody else was, effectively, cleared out. White House wags noted that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had fled as far as Sudan — where he was negotiating a good-behavior economic pact with the former terrorism-sponsor nation — to get distance from this last election gasp. The one person Trump did have at his side, Rudy Giuliani, was drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania.

Almost everyone who remained around the president understood that he, along with Giuliani, did in fact actually believe that there was yet a decent chance of upsetting the electoral count and having Trump declared the Electoral College winner or, failing that, prolonging the election and returning the fight to the disputed states. The president’s aides (and family) understood, too, that he was the only one (along with Giuliani, which only made the situation more alarming) in any professional political sphere to believe this. Hence — although they did not call it such and tried to see it as more nuanced — derangement.

There had been hardly a waking hour in the past 48 during which he and Giuliani had not been on the phone in pent-up nervousness and excitement over the coming battle in Congress on January 6. They were two generals poring over a map of the battlefield. Both men, egged on by hypotheticals ever nearer to fantasy and after exhausting all other options, had come to take it as an article of faith that the vice-president could simply reject Biden electors in favor of Trump ones and thereby hand the election to Trump; or, falling short of that, that the vice-president could determine that a state legislature ought to give further consideration to possible discrepancies in the state’s vote and send back the questioned electors for a reconsideration of their certification.

“There is no question, none at all, that the VP can do this. That’s a fact. The Constitution gives him the authority not to certify. It goes back to the state legislatures,” said Giuliani, as though on a loop. He kept repeating this to the president and to the others who were part of the continual conversation on his cell phone. (“Yes … Yes … Yes … Here’s the thing … Hold on a second … Hey, let me get back to you …”)

The president, in his own loop, kept similarly repeating this back to Giuliani.

And they both similarly repeated this to everyone else with such insistent determination that it overrode any opportunity to disagree with them or even engage in the conversation. Throughout, they continued to weigh the odds that the vice-president would come along: sometimes 50-50, sometimes as much as 60-40, even somewhat more. At the grimmest, 30-70. But always a solid shot.

The rest of the president’s aides gave it essentially no chance. They weren’t putting much stock in the January 6 rally, which looked to those around Trump less like a way to keep the president in power than a way to make money afterward. [Continue reading…]