Just ahead of President Donald Trump’s planned speech Wednesday in front of the White House, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani took the stage to explain to the crowd that, yes, Congress can totally deliver Trump an unearned second term if it really wants to.

He proposed “trial by combat,” presumably a figurative proposition launched into a fraught atmosphere, to settle the matter.

“We don’t want to find out three weeks from now even more proof that this election was stolen, do we?” Giuliani begged.

Stealing the election for Trump, Giuliani said, would be both “perfectly legal” and “perfectly appropriate.”

The President’s lawyer claimed that he’d received “letters from five legislatures” asking for more time to investigate their vote tallies.

That’s not true: President Trump tweeted one of Rudy’s examples Tuesday night, it was signed by just four members of the Pennsylvania legislature.

“If they ran such a clean election, they’d have you come in and look at the paper ballots!” the President’s lawyer said, seeming to inadvertently describe a process that does in fact takes place in every state, for every election, in which members of the public observe the ballot-counting process.

“If we’re wrong, we will be made fools of,” Giuliani predicted. “But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail.”

“So, let’s have trial by combat!” Giuliani said, accurately stressing that both he and Trump were willing to stake their reputations on the assertion that there had been criminality in the 2020 election.

He introduced a law professor, John Eastman, who patiently explained “a secret folder” in the ballot-counting machines had corrupted the elections Tuesday night in Georgia and in November.

Watch below:

“Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent. And if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, and lot of them will go to jail. So — let’s have trial by combat” — Giuliani pic.twitter.com/QAYvnplCj7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 6, 2021