The insurrection was a complex, years long
plot, not a one-day event. And it isn’t over.
By Ed Kilgore
The House select committee’s
investigation into the Capitol Riot and the various media ticktocks explaining
what Donald Trump and his allies were doing in the days immediately leading up
to it are casting new light on an important threat to American democracy. But
the intense focus on a few wild days in Washington can be misleading as well.
Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 presidential election began shortly after
the 2016 election, and arguably the moment of peak peril for Joe Biden’s
inauguration had already passed by the time Trump addressed the Stop the Steal
rally on January 6.
A full
timeline of the attempted insurrection is helpful in putting Trump’s frantic,
last-minute schemes into the proper context and countering the false impression
that January 6 was an improvised, impossible-to-replicate event, rather than
one part of an ongoing campaign. If Congress fails to seize its brief
opportunity to reform our electoral system, the
danger could recur in future elections — perhaps with a different, catastrophic
outcome.
NOVEMBER 27, 2016 – NOVEMBER 3, 2020
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK
Trump claims “millions” voted illegally in 2016
Epitomizing
the rare phenomenon of the sore winner, Trump insisted in
late November 2016 that he would have won the popular vote as well as the
Electoral College “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
He repeated the lie for
years and even claimed falsely in a June 2019 interview with Meet the
Press that California “admitted” it had counted “a million” illegal
votes.
This
wasn’t just a tossed-off random Trumpian fabrication. His insistence that
Democrats had deployed ineligible (and probably noncitizen) voters led to his
appointment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May
2017. The commission was ostensibly led by Vice-President Mike Pence but was
more closely identified with its co-chairman Kris Kobach, the
immigrant-bashing, vote-suppressing secretary of State of Kansas. As David
Daley explains, it was
a wide-ranging fishing expedition that caught exactly zero fish:
Kobach’s plan was easy to
discern: The commission was to be the front through which a cabal of shadowy
Republican activists and oft-debunked academics, backed by misleading studies,
laundered their phony voting-fraud theories into a justification for real-world
suppression tactics such as national voter ID and massive coast-to-coast
electoral-roll purges.
The
commission was soon disbanded empty-handed, with
Kobach & Co. blaming its failure on noncooperation from states that refused
to turn over voters’ personal information. But in MAGA Land, wild voter-fraud
claims become more credible each time they are repeated, so the commission was
a sound investment in future lies.
Republicans raise bogus concerns about ballot counting
in the 2018 midterms
In an
effort to spin Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections, House GOP
leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy seized
on four contests in California in which Republicans led in early vote counting
but lost when late mail ballots came in. Without alleging (much less proving)
anything in particular, congressional Republicans suggested skullduggery in
what was a normal trend in the counting of entirely legal ballots signed and
mailed before Election Day but received afterward. I dismissed this GOP spin,
which McCarthy was still pushing a year later, but warned that
“all this ex post facto delegitimization of elections that [Republicans] lost
sounds like a dress rehearsal for how they’ll behave if they do poorly again
next year.”
The
president himself made similar allegations after the 2018 midterms, though he
focused on two races the GOP eventually won. On Veterans Day, Trump declared
that Florida’s Senate and governor’s race should be called in favor of the
Republicans who were ahead on Election Night, though legally cast overseas
military and civilian mail ballots had yet to be counted. He tweeted,
falsely, that these “massively infected” ballots had shown up “out of nowhere”
and thus must be ignored:
The Florida Election
should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers
of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or
forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected.
Must go with Election Night!
This did,
indeed, turn out to be a dress rehearsal. Trump went on to make almost identical charges about
late-arriving (or just late-counted) mail ballots on Election Night 2020.
Trump suggests that voting by mail is inherently
fraudulent
As the
COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020, states holding primaries and special
elections naturally began liberalizing opportunities to vote by mail. Trump
went bananas on Twitter in May, threatening to
withhold federal funding from Michigan because its secretary of State had
sent absentee-ballot applications to all
registered voters.
Twitter,
in what was then an unprecedented action, took down two Trump tweets in which
he mendaciously attacked California for
“sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone … no matter who they are or how
they got there.” Actually, of course, the ballots went only to registered
voters.
Trump’s
goal seemed clear: By
asserting that voting by mail is tantamount to voter fraud, he was setting up a
bogus justification for contesting election results in any state he lost.
Trump prepares to exploit the “Red Mirage”
Team
Trump’s parallel strategy was
to get Republicans to eschew voting by mail to ensure that the votes most often
counted first (in-person Election Day ballots) would skew red as forcefully as
possible (which is why one analyst dubbed
the scheme the “Red Mirage”). As Election Day approached, there were many signs that,
simply by attacking voting by mail as illegitimate, Trump was succeeding in
discouraging his supporters from voting that way, thus producing the desired
Election Night “skew” in his favor.
In
September, Trump’s hostility to mail ballots and threats to just claim victory
became more intense and regular. In his first debate with
Biden, on September 30, the plan to contest any election loss was made plain.
Following an incoherent diatribe recapping his unfounded claims of rampant
voter fraud, Trump was pressed on whether he would urge his supporters to “stay
calm” and “not engage in any civil unrest” during the ballot-counting process,
which would likely be drawn out due to unprecedented levels of voting by mail.
“Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election
has been independently certified?” moderator Chris Wallace asked.
“I’m
urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully,”
Trump replied. “If
it’s a fair election, I am 100 percent onboard. But if I see tens of thousands
of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”
NOVEMBER 4, 2020 – JANUARY 5, 2021
THE POSTELECTION SCRAMBLE
Trump declares victory on Election Night
With
Trump ahead but giving up ground in a number of states he would ultimately
lose, he made his long-awaited play. At
around 3 a.m. on November 4, he concluded his remarks to his supporters by
saying:
This is a fraud on the
American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready
to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this
election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this
nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want
the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme
Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at
four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad
moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this. And as far as
I’m concerned, we already have won it.
It seems
plausible that Trump delayed his premature victory claim by a few hours because
it initially appeared that he might win legitimately. An “insider” account of
Trump’s Election Night activities recently published in the Washington Post aired
the theory that his declaration might have been spurred by a spontaneous
suggestion from an inebriated Rudy Giuliani. But the many times Trump himself
predicted he would do exactly this would indicate otherwise.
Trump’s “clown show” legal team challenges the election in
court
A
steadily changing cast of Trump campaign lawyers, eventually featuring
histrionic extremists Giuliani and Sidney Powell, fired off 62 federal and state lawsuits challenging
many aspects of the election results. Most were laughably frivolous, and 61
were rejected on widely varying grounds. The one that succeeded, in
Pennsylvania, involved a small number of ballots with technical errors that a
local judge had allowed voters to “cure” after a statutory deadline.
There
were two big opportunities for a Hail Mary from the Supreme Court, but Trump
lost both times. On December 8, the Court refused without comment to
hear a claim by Republican congressman Mike Kelly that Pennsylvania’s expansion
of voting by mail was invalid because it was not enacted by a constitutional
amendment. And on December 11, another shot at the claim that state
legislatures cannot delegate their election powers was rejected by the Court on
grounds that the state bringing the suit had no standing to challenge
procedures in the targeted states (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and
Wisconsin).
By then,
the Trump campaign’s legal effort had descended into full farce, as became
obvious on November 19 when Giuliani and Powell held a wild press conference featuring
outlandish conspiracy theories, including communist manipulation of voting
machines. Both Attorney General William Barr and White House adviser Jared
Kushner reportedly dismissed
the Trump legal team’s efforts as a “clown show.”
Trump tries to enlist Republican state legislators
Arguably
the most serious Trump attempt to steal the election involved pleas to
Republican legislators in key states won by Biden to dispute the results before
they could be certified (the step before the formal award of electoral votes).
As of November 21, Trump was publicly making arguments for this extreme remedy,
but as Politico observed, it was
a long shot from the get-go: “Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won
would need to move to overturn their state’s popular vote and appoint a slate
of Trump electors when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14.” The opposition
of Democratic governors in Michigan and Pennsylvania would have stopped such
maneuvers absent an unlikely court finding that legislatures have sole power to
appoint electors. And legislators in those two states didn’t respond to
Trump’s requests for assistance.
All 50
states and the District of Columbia certified their election returns by
December 9, and on December 14, presidential electors cast their ballots to
make Biden the president-elect.
Trump pressures Georgia officials to “find” 11,000 votes
Trump
continued his attempt to find state politicians willing to help him reverse the
election results even after passing every deadline established by Congress over more
than a century to cut off presidential-election disputes.
On December 5, he
called Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who had backed the certification of Biden’s
win, to ask him to convene the state legislature to overturn the results and
appoint pro-Trump electors (Kemp declined to do so). On December 23,
Trump called Bonnie
Watson, a lowly election investigator for Georgia secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger, urging her to find fault with mail ballots since “I won
[Georgia] by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”
On
January 2, 2021, he concluded this particular line of election tampering
by appealing directly to Raffensperger to
find him some more votes. “So look. All I want to do is this,” the president
said in a recorded conversation. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is
one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
Trump urges Justice Department to declare the election
“corrupt”
Trump was
also working the state angle from the other direction, conspiring in
particular with Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to push
Republican legislatures to investigate and possibly overturn Biden’s victory.
Clark drafted a letter to
Republican officials in Georgia, claiming falsely that the DOJ was
“investigating various irregularities” in the 2020 election. The letter urged
them to convene a special legislative session to investigate these voter-fraud
claims and consider “issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential
Electors.” Clark reportedly prepared
similar letters addressed to GOP legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan,
Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
None of
these letters was ever sent out because Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen
and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue refused to go along. “There
is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this,” Donoghue
told Clark in an email obtained by
ABC News.
In recent
closed-door testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosen said his
monthlong tenure as acting attorney general was marked by Trump’s “persistent”
efforts to have the Justice Department discredit the election results. For
instance, during a December 27 phone call, Rosen told Trump that he needed to
“understand that the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of
the election, doesn’t work that way,” according to Donoghue’s notes on
the call.
“[I]
don’t expect you to do that,” Trump reportedly answered, “just say that the
election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”
Only a
wholesale revolt by senior DOJ staff prevented Trump from carrying out the
plan. On January 3, the president met with top Justice Department officials to
discuss his desire to oust Rosen in favor of Clark, who could then advance
bogus voter-fraud claims and pressure state officials as acting attorney
general. Trump was informed that DOJ leaders had agreed to resign en masse if
he fired Rosen, and the president eventually accepted that the move “would
trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department but also congressional
investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract
attention from his efforts to overturn the election results,” according to the
New York Times.
Trump attempts to bully Pence into rejecting Biden’s
electoral votes
Trump
still had an even more dangerous trick up his sleeve: getting his faithful
vice-president, Pence, to steal the election for him when Congress convened on
January 6 to perform the routine task of confirming the December 14 Electoral
College vote.
This
potentially revolutionary maneuver had two prongs. First, Congressman Louie
Gohmert of Texas filed a lawsuit contending that the Electoral Count Act of
1887, which governs the rubber-stamping of the electoral vote count, was an
unconstitutional abrogation of the vice-president’s power to recognize and
count electors however he wanted. Gohmert’s claim was quickly rejected by the
federal courts.
At the
same time, Trump lobbied Pence
publicly and privately to do whatever he could in announcing electors to deny
Biden the 270 electoral votes he needed to become president-elect. Perhaps the
sycophant-in-chief would give Trump an outright victory, or maybe he would
simply create a dispute that would throw the contest to the U.S. House, where
Republicans controlled a majority of delegations.
But Pence
famously refused to claim “unilateral authority to determine which electoral
votes should be counted and which should not,” earning him the enmity of both
the Boss and the January 6 mob.
Trump calls on congressional allies to block
confirmation of Biden’s win
The
fallback strategy for interfering with Biden’s accession to the presidency was
to utilize the procedures in the Electoral Count Act enabling challenges in
Congress to individual state certifications. Alabama congressman Mo
Brooks announced in
early December that he would challenge selected Biden electors.
Trump
promptly thanked Brooks
publicly and encouraged others to join him, particularly in the Senate since
every challenge requires the support of at least one member from each chamber.
Mitch McConnell discouraged his troops from joining the rebellion, but soon
enough, hard-core Trump supporters like Tommy Tuberville, Josh
Hawley, Ted Cruz, and others climbed aboard the Insurrection Express.
This set
the stage for the Capitol Riot.
JANUARY 6, 2021 – PRESENT
THE INSURRECTION GOES LIVE
Trump rallies supporters to “stop the steal” on January
6
For
weeks, Trump called on his supporters to descend on Washington on January 6 to
protest Biden’s election (and back whatever play he could manage in Congress).
On December 20, he tweeted,
“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election…. Big protest in DC on
January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
By
December 30, multiple groups, some of them known for armed extremism,
were planning to
converge on D.C. in response to Trump’s summons. “Stop the Steal,” a rubric invented
by Roger Stone in 2016 in anticipation of a Hillary Clinton victory, became the
protesters’ organizing slogan.
As a
joint session of Congress was convening to confirm the Biden victory, Trump
addressed the faithful gathered on the National Mall. Much of the debate over
his subsequent impeachment and Senate trial revolved
around exactly what he said to the demonstrators who subsequently broke into
the Capitol and temporarily shut down the confirmation of Biden’s victory. Was
this the smoking gun from
his address?
All of us here today do
not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left
Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media.
That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will
never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft
involved.
Or maybe
this?
We’re going to walk down
to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen
and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of
them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to
show strength, and you have to be strong.
Equally
significant from a broader perspective was Trump’s language echoing the lies he
told about Democrats “finding” votes during the wee hours on Election Night, which
he would continue to use as a rallying cry long afterward:
Our
election was over at ten o’clock in the evening. We’re leading Pennsylvania,
Michigan, Georgia, by hundreds of thousands of votes.
And then late in the
evening, or early in the morning — boom — these explosions of
bullshit. And all of a sudden. All of a sudden it started to happen.
Arizona conducts an endless election “audit”
Even
after the failure of the January 6 insurrection, and then Biden’s inauguration,
cut off even the most remote possibility of an election coup, Trump claimed
vindication when Republican senators saved him from being convicted and banned from holding office
again after his second impeachment. Then he and his supporters
devised another way to keep pointlessly challenging the 2020 results. In
Arizona (with sporadic efforts to repeat the tactic in other states, so far
unsuccessfully), hard-core Trump activists in the state senate ordered an
election “audit” (a legally meaningless term) of votes in Maricopa County,
which went solidly for Biden after Trump carried it in 2016.
This strange exercise,
conducted by an unqualified consulting firm led by a pro-Trump conspiracy
theorist, was supposed to last 60 days but has now gone on for more than five
months without producing any evidence of the kind of irregularities that might
call Biden’s Arizona win into question. The idea seems to be to muddy the
waters just enough that those who already believe in a Biden “steal” can
nourish their grievances right up until the next presidential cycle.
Trump keeps the Big Lie alive
There’s
been a lot of media derision about Trump’s postpresidential efforts to wave the
bloody shirt of the stolen election. It’s easy to assume the 45th president is
just trying to stay in the news or stay relevant or give vent to his natural
mood of narcissistic grievance and vengeance. However, the damage he is doing
to the credibility of democratic institutions among Republican rank-and-file
voters and conservative activists is not fading but is being compounded daily.
It’s
entirely plausible that Trump or some authorized successor will build on the
lies he deployed so regularly during the 2020 election cycle and plan a
heads-I-win, tails-you-lose response to whatever happens on November 5, 2024,
as I argued in
April 2021:
If you
begin not with the assumption that Trump’s entire effort to
steal the election was absurd but regard it as an audacious plan that wasn’t
executed with the necessary precision, then reverse engineering it to fix the
broken parts makes sense …
And the really heady
thing for Trump is knowing how easy it was to convince the GOP rank-and-file
base that his lies were the gospel truth.
Put
together shrewd vote suppressors,
audacious state legislators, emboldened conservative media, a better slate of
lawyers, a new generation of compliant judges, and quite possibly a Republican-controlled Congress, and the
insurrection plot could finally succeed.