The insurrection was a complex, yearslong plot, not a one-day event. And it isn’t over.
President Donald Trump arrives to address the Stop the Steal rally near the White House on January 6, 2021. Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Getty Images 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.
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.
This did, indeed, turn out to be a dress rehearsal. Trump went on to make almost identical charges about late-arriving mail ballots on Election Night 2020. 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 would skew red as forcefully as possible . 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.
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 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 .
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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:
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