If Trump had had a more pliant vice president — chief of staff Mark Meadows, for example, who had already helped Trump try to coerce Georgia elections officials into “finding” 12,000 extra votes for him there — his plan likely would have proceeded. And the consequences for the country, legal experts agree, would have been horrific. Both Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and McConnell, who at that point was still Senate majority leader, would have rejected such a move. The pair could have gone as far as to remove the vice president from the presiding officer role and gone ahead with ratifying the Dec. 14 Electoral College results untouched, said Conway, who believes that Pence would have been constrained legally. “He couldn’t have declared Donald Trump the winner. He could only have mucked up the proceedings and slowed things down,” Conway said. But that fails to take into account Trump’s likely refusal to accept a congressional ruling contrary to that of his vice president’s, and what he might have then told his followers — among them a sizeable number of white supremacist “militia” members — to do on his behalf, said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard. “Chaotic, ungoverned, potentially violent,” he said. “It’s terrifying how all of that has been normalized.”