The riot angle
By 
A most cheesy proposed autogolpe:
In late 2020, a group of conservative movement attorneys set out to build a legal pathway by which Donald Trump could stay in power, having lost the election.
We’ve known about the outcome of their work for three years now: how it led to the violence of Jan. 6, and fed the dream of Trump’s supporters that he might continue to serve after Jan. 20, 2021.
But TPM can now reveal the ways in which their theorizing, in early stages, went even further than previously known, imagining a Jan. 6 that lasted for not hours but days, an intervention by Supreme Court justices that they presumed to be loyal to President Trump, and a vice president who upended his constitutional duties, allowing the U.S. to descend into chaos.
A trove of documents obtained by TPM details many of the conversations among Trump campaign lawyers, and, in particular, the theories offered by Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who worked with the campaign in the months leading up to Jan. 6.
Within weeks of Trump denouncing the election itself and claiming that he had won, Chesebro and Trump campaign attorneys around him began to explore more exotic legal theories in which endless chaos in Congress would prove that the legislature could not certify a winner. That stalemate, they theorized, would force the Supreme Court to act.
[…]
The trove includes encounters that, in typically Trumpian fashion, range from the showy to the menacing to the bizarre. At one point, Chesebro infuriates former chief of staff Reince Preibus by telling Trump in December 2020 that he still has a chance at winning on Jan. 6; at another, John Eastman speculates that Chief Justice John Roberts might be on their side if not for fear of how “to account for the riots angle” should the Supreme Court declare Trump the winner. Chesebro at one point referred to Pence declining to open electoral votes from Georgia as a “fairly boss move;” at another, he forgets that Biden, and not Pence, was Vice President in 2016 while asking a Pence attorney about his plans for Jan. 6, 2021.
It’s worth noting that these plans to assassinate American democracy generally ended with the assumption that the Supreme Court would pull the trigger. I wonder what gave them that idea.