A new documentary from HBO chronicles the aftermath of the 2020 elections in Georgia, Arizona and around the country as former President Donald Trump and his allies worked feverishly to overturn his election loss to President Joe Biden.
For those of us who were there, watching “Stopping the Steal” is like reliving those tumultuous weeks and months — but with the benefit of knowing now what we didn’t know then.
For example, we now know that while Trump was contesting Georgia’s results through lawsuits, Legislative hearings and demands of Republican officials, he and his allies were doing the exact same thing in multiple other states across the country.
“I was for Trump the whole time,” then-Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers says in the documentary. “And then it started. The steal.”
We also know now, as detailed in “Stopping the Steal,” that Trump’s own Justice Department investigated his claims of election fraud. But after looking into his allegations, the officials told him there was no evidence to back them up.
BJ Pak, Trump’s U.S. Attorney based in Atlanta at the time, investigated Trump’s claims that Fulton County election workers had secretly double counted ballots at State Farm Arena.
“We debunked all the allegations,” Pak says in the documentary, adding Trump’s ongoing claims that the Georgia election was rigged were completely false. “I think the public was misled,” Pak says.
The major takeaway from the film, though, is not a description of what’s already happened, but a warning from a slew of former Trump officials about what they believe is still to come.
“Jan. 6 was like a trailer to a movie,” said Stephanie Grisham, a former White House communications director for Trump. “You always think he’ll just go this far and there’s not more. There’s always more.”
Alyssa Farrah, White House communications director at the end of Trump’s term, said much the same. “We’re in a very dangerous place heading into the next election. If he loses, I don’t think that you can expect he’s going to take it peacefully,” she said.
If that is the lens through which some of Trump’s former staff are viewing the upcoming elections, it’s the same lens we should use to view the last six months in Georgia, where a newly pro-Trump majority on the State Election Board has moved swiftly to make major changes to the processes for counting and certifying the upcoming election.
Three recently passed rules are particularly sweeping. The first is a new requirement on county boards of elections to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into the conduct of the election before certifying the November results. Another states election officials will produce “all election-related documentation” that’s requested ahead of the certification.
The third is a mandate to hand count ballots in each precinct on election night to make sure the number of ballots cast matches the number of ballots counted.
The rules are the kinds of ideas a legislature would typically debate in hearings and floor action well ahead of an election. Instead they’ve been quickly proposed and passed in 3-to-2 votes, with the Trump-aligned members pushing them through.
Also concerning for election watchdogs, the proposals seem geared to assure GOP voters the next election will be secure, not to fix any broken part of Georgia’s election apparatus. In a worst-case scenario, Democrats warn the new rules are also laying the groundwork for confusion and chaos after the November election.
With early voting just two weeks away, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney heard arguments Tuesday in a challenge to the new certification rule. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Mark Niesse reports McBurney seemed unlikely to strike down the rule because state law clearly requires counties to certify results one week after the election.
“The deadline is the deadline. Get done what you can,” McBurney said in court. “What is reasonable to one person might be not reasonable to another. But you make your inquiry and then it’s wheels up at 5 p.m. on the 12th of November.”
By “wheels up,” McBurney means the election results must be certified and finalized according to state law. We also learned in 2020 that certification is also the necessary first step for a campaign to formally challenge an election result, as Trump did in Georgia.
The false claims in Trump’s legal challenges were tossed out of multiple courts in Georgia for multiple reasons. But in the chaotic weeks that followed, the same claims became the basis for legislative hearings into election fraud that the president’s staff told him had not happened. By Jan. 6, they were at the root of Trump’s demand that Republican members of Congress not certify the election for Biden and send it back to state legislatures instead.
A handful of Republicans in power that day — Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — refused to go along with the demands from Trump and his supporters that they “Stop the Steal,” and the election was certified for Biden.
Could the same sequence of events happen again this year if Trump narrowly loses Georgia? We already know now what we didn’t know in 2020 — that Trump and his supporters have already mounted a multistate effort to challenge and undermine the election results once, even with nothing more than doubts and false claims to base it on.
Of course the same thing could happen again. In many ways, it already is.
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