Former president Donald Trump is either delusional or believes he can lie his way out of anything. There’s no other way to explain his declaring before an audience at the Economic Club in Chicago this week that there was “a peaceful transfer of power” in 2021, when in truth the Jan. 6 insurrection was anything but that. The assault on Congress was the most seditious attack on the American democratic process in history, and Trump was the cause of it all.

Trump may babble that “it was love and peace,” as he told the audience. But pesky things called facts speak otherwise.

After the 2020 presidential election, Congress met in a joint session on Jan. 6, as required by the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, for a certification proceeding presided over by the vice president in his capacity as president of the Senate. The purpose of the session was to count each state’s electoral votes, resolve any objections and announce the result, thus certifying the winner of the presidential election.

Performance of that function has been foundational to our democracy and has always been conducted in a peaceful and orderly manner. That is, until Jan. 6, 2021, when the defeated Trump learned that Vice President Mike Pence would not participate in Trump’s fraudulent scheme to deny Joe Biden his rightful victory. Instead, Trump had wanted Pence to reject legitimate electoral votes or send them back to state legislatures for review rather than counting them.

Trump’s insistence. Pence’s rejection. All hell broke loose.

Trump falsely told a mob of his supporters — drawn to Washington to protest Biden’s Election Day victory on bogus grounds that the election had been stolen — that Pence could change the results; they were directed to Capitol Hill to obstruct the proceedings and pressure Pence to take the fraudulent actions that he had told Trump he wouldn’t do.

Trump’s followers violently mobbed the Capitol, breaking windows and doors, beating and bloodying police; they tried to hunt down the speaker of the House and stormed and occupied the Senate floor, including the presiding officer’s chair. Some built gallows while chanting about murdering Pence, who was spirited away to safety by his Secret Service detail.

Their goal was to halt the constitutionally prescribed proceeding. And they succeeded.

For the first time in U.S. history, the peaceful transfer of power was stopped dead in its tracks by insurrectionists who also forced panic-stricken members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to abandon their chambers and flee the Capitol, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel (R-Ky.) described in a floor speech following Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment trial.

They fled as Trump watched the sedition unfold on Fox News from the comfort of the White House. Told by White House staff that Pence was being hustled into hiding from insurrectionists who were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump reportedly said, “So what?”

Thanks largely to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and then-acting police chief Robert J. Contee III, who rushed more than 800 D.C. police officers to help Capitol Police fight off and clear the building of pro-Trump insurrectionists, the peaceful journey toward the transfer of presidential power was restarted after a nearly six-hour delay. Pence announced Biden’s victory at 3:42 a.m. on Jan. 7.

These were the events that Trump, devious or untouched by reality, described as “love and peace” this week.

Since that Jan. 6 day of darkness, more than 1,500 people across the country have been charged with crimes related to the Capitol invasion, including more than 500 charged with the felony of assaulting or impeding law enforcement, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.

“There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell said several weeks after the attack.

But Trump probably can’t even imagine people would think that of him. Not in the warped and narcissistic world where he dwells — which, if the American people put democracy first, will vote to keep a megalomaniac Trump from returning to the White House.

Colbert I. King is a columnist for The Washington Post.