In the end, it is likely to finish right where it began — just west of the Delaware River.
In 1856, a nascent Republican party levelled accusations of voting fraud at Democrats in Philadelphia, accusing their political rivals of stealing the state and congressional elections that year with the help of thousands of illegal votes.
Now, 164 years later, US President Donald Trump, aided by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, has been attempting to repeat history, alleging in the weeks before this year’s presidential election that “bad things happen in Philadelphia”, as he put it in one of the debates, and continuing those claims, after voting concluded.
In 1856, Republicans’ concerns of fraud were well-founded. In those state elections, at least 4,000 votes were cast illegally, subsequent congressional testimony showed.
In 2020, Mr Trump and his legal team have struggled, thus far, to produce any evidence of fraud in Pennsylvania. Not that this has stopped them. Last week in a hotel ballroom in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Mr Giuliani told gathered Republican state lawmakers that their election was “a sham”, adding: “I know crooks really well. You give them an inch and they take a mile. You give them a mile and they take your whole country.”
A second member of Mr Trump’s legal team held up her cell phone so Mr Trump could appear as a “witness”. “This was an election that we won easily. We won it by a lot,” the president told the room, saying he was “very sad” to report that the vote had been “rigged”. “We can’t let it happen for our country. This election has to be turned around,” he added.
For the past three weeks, the country has had a taste of how Mr Trump would like to do that with the legal challenges, Mr Giuliani’s press appearances and the president’s tweets all offering a through-the-looking-glass version of reality.
President-elect Joe Biden has begun naming top members of his cabinet. Almost every major world leader has recognised Mr Biden as the next president, and a formal transition process between the two administrations has begun.
Nevertheless, Mr Giuliani and Mr Trump have persisted. Their legal quest travelled from Pennsylvania’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the site of Mr Giuliani’s post-election press conference, to the Republican National Committee’s headquarters where Mr Giuliani — hair dye streaming down his cheeks — and other members of Mr Trump’s legal team alleged that George Soros and the late Hugo Chávez had conspired on election software to rig the vote for Mr Biden.
On Thanksgiving, Mr Trump said it was too soon to call the day his last celebration of the holiday in the White House, even though he has conceded that he would leave if Mr Biden was confirmed as winner. But his potential legal paths are closing. On Saturday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out a GOP lawsuit seeking to invalidate more than 2.5m votes cast by mail in the state. A day earlier, a federal appeals court rejected a separate lawsuit from Mr Trump seeking to overturn the certification of Mr Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.
Mr Trump’s legal team says the next step is the US Supreme Court. However, even the president has expressed doubt that the cases will actually make it there, as he acknowledged in a television interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.
Some Democrats and scholars have cheered Mr Trump’s legal losses as evidence of the resilience of the US legal system and democratic process. “We operate under the rule of law, and not the rule of the soapbox from the driveway of Four Seasons Total Landscaping,” Mark Aronchick, a lawyer who has argued against Mr Giuliani, told ABC News.
The reality, however, may be more bleak. Polling shows roughly half of Republican voters believe the election was “rigged” — and Mr Trump continues to stoke the fire.
In his interview with Ms Bartiromo, Mr Trump said his complaints were likely to continue well past the December 14 vote of the electoral college and January 20 inauguration. “My mind,” he warned, “will not change in six months.”
That much is certain. The question is how many other minds he can continue to convince in the meantime.
courtney.weaver@ft.com