Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's secretary of state, made a heroic effort Saturday to speak truth to a deranged politician's demand that he help throw the election for him.
As he found out, it's impossible to reason with a madman.
That politician -- that madman -- is the nation's incumbent president, Donald J. Trump, who told Raffensperger: "There's nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you've recalculated."
It was the lowest moment in the history of the presidency, worse even than Richard Nixon's failed attempt to cover up his campaign's involvement in the Watergate burglary.
An even lower mark will be set by those Republicans in Congress who would become Trump's accomplices by voting to reject Democratic electoral slates this week. Trump may be insane. What's their excuse?
Fittingly, it was The Washington Post, whose investigations brought Nixon down, that obtained a recording and a transcript of Trump's impeachment-worthy telephone call Saturday.
For an hour and two minutes on the telephone, Trump harangued Raffensperger, pressuring him to help "find 11,780 votes" that would erase the 16 presidential electors Joe Biden won in Georgia. He regurgitated a slew of false claims and exaggerations, most of which had been fed to him by others. Some revealed Trump's own irrational imagination.
When they could get a word in, Raffensperger and his lawyer, Ryan Germany, tried patiently to rebut Trump's ravings. It was clear Trump wasn't listening.
Trump also suggested that Raffensperger and Germany risked criminal prosecution if they refused to accept his wildly irrational allegations of massive election crimes by others.
"That's a big risk to you and to Ryan," said Trump, effectively committing what could reasonably be construed as two counts of attempted extortion.
It has been said from antiquity that "those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad." So insanity would be a plausible defense, although it boggles the mind to imagine Trump admitting it. His megalomania and narcissism could quite possibly have shut his mind to the facts that the election was carried out and counted with scrupulous integrity, and that Biden won it.
It is also possible, though, that Trump knows all that. If so, he is as deliberate, cynical and diabolical a liar as has ever stalked the planet Earth. Even Third World military juntas come up with better excuses for overthrowing elected governments.
Make no mistake. That's what Trump was trying to do.
"Can you imagine how many other calls like this he might have made over the past four years that we don't yet know about?" tweeted presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
It can be imagined. Trump would also need to overthrow the returns in Arizona and Wisconsin just to get a 269-269 electoral vote tie that would require the House of Representatives to elect the next president. It's well known that he tried to delay the certification of Pennsylvania votes, and he and his surrogates filed unsuccessful court challenges against both Wisconsin's and Pennsylvania's.
For now, however, the more important question is why a substantial segment of the Republican Party in Congress is poised to support Trump's unprecedented attempt at a coup d'etat.
That is what rejection of any of Biden's fairly won electors would accomplish if the Republicans insist on challenging them. The conduct of those Congress members would be as irresponsible and un-American as that of Trump himself.
Only once in recent years did such a congressional objection even come to a vote. That was in 2005, when the House voted 267-31 and the Senate 74-1 against blocking George W. Bush's electoral votes from Ohio. The Democratic objectors said they were only trying to make a point about election reform, but Secretary of State John Kerry, who lost the election, disavowed their efforts, as did nearly all the other Democrats in Congress.
In 2001, Vice President Al Gore sealed his loss to Bush by ruling out of order similar objections to Florida's electors because no senator had signed them.
But now there are at least 12 Senate Republicans who intend to object on Trump's behalf, as well as -- so they say -- 140 members of the House. And it's Trump, most unlike Gore and Kerry, who's inciting them to do it.
They have puerile excuses. One is that the public needs to be reassured through the medium of a congressional investigation that the election was fair. That's "nonsense," as Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, put it.
"This argument ignores the widely perceived reality that Congress is an overwhelmingly partisan body; the American people wisely place greater trust in the federal courts where judges serve for life," Romney said in a statement. "Members of Congress who would substitute their own partisan judgment for that of the courts do not enhance public trust, they imperil it. Were Congress to actually reject state electors, partisans would inevitably demand the same any time their candidate had lost. Congress, not voters in the respective states, would choose our presidents."
Another pretext is that it's merely a protest. But that's not how history will treat it and it's not how it will be seen everywhere else in the world. Russia's Vladimir Putin and other unfriendly tyrants will delight in the degrading example. Everywhere else, defenders of democracy will be distraught.
So, for the Republican members in Congress the choice is clear: America or Trump? It is no longer possible to be for both.