Let’s be honest, getting someone to sit down and watch a documentary about the Big Lie is quite the Big Ask! Who wants to revisit one of the darkest periods of America’s political history while we are in the process of creating somewhere hopefully not quite so horrid.
In spite of its name, HBO’s “Stopping the Steal” is as relevant to the post-trump second election which placed Joe Biden in power and a then-warlike Trump as president as it is able to be to the wider question of events to come. In this 90 minute film that will begin airing at 9 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, the filmmaker focuses on the determination and success/failure of Donald Trump and his subordinates’ aspiration to change the election outcome.
A coherent narrative of former Trump officials, political aides and Republican operatives who were in action before as well as after the elections, describes the entire process of attempting to carry out an insidious plot to steal the elections, and how they were thwarted.
With Dan Reed directing, the viewer is brought back to the end summer of 2020 in the documentary entitled, “Stopping the Steal”. “By late summer, President Trump starts to grease the wheels for excuses if he lost,” recollects Alyssa Farah Griffin, the 2020 White House strategic communications director and an assistant to the president. The documentary cuts to a summer press conference and follows it up with a clip of the then-incumbent president arguing that, “These elections will be fraudulent. They’ll be fixed or rigged.” It is prominent that Trump was familiar with the nature of the general elections from the interviews and videos shared throughout the film. This is a worrying attitude that he has carried and employed for a long time. For Trump, any accusation never goes unfelt, and the anticipation surrounding the elections only frustrated him further. The election paranoia only reached new heights for the president as he proceeded with some unspeakable things. It draws us to 6th January 2021. We see how absolutely Trump was willing to do anything to remain the sitting president in spite of the elections which he lost to Joe Biden. Events or actions that we have been acquainted with before, such as a series of threatening remarks made by the president to Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger while demanding him to find the votes for the president and Trump admitting him losing the elections to Joe Biden behind closed doors, acquire a new dimension today via the narration of witnesses who inhibited the success of his plans.
Many political pundits believed that they were having a moment of clarity when they stated that as soon as the elections were over, “you have to instruct the President”. However, the country did see a sharp fall in the President’s popularity by the election day as he tried inciting insurrection violently. Former republican, William Barr describes these events in such words: “Post election, I certainly had no illusions about Donald Trump. I knew I was working with an exceptionally flawed individual who was intent on undermining the rule of law.” People even began speculating that he would attempt to stage a coup. “When it was clear that [the backlash from his supporters] did not succeed: That’s when he went ‘Oh no, I’ll just seize power’,” Grisham narrates.
The dramatic first steps following the announcement of the election’s results was when Vice President Mike Pence had to make an unscheduled appearance before the Capitol Police headquarters. The images of the aftermath resulting from the violent de evolution of the election’s results reveal a terrifying tale a complete evolution and disintegration of the US political system.
The movie, for instance, includes Trump together with his impostors, including people like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and Sidney Powell telling lies about what happened to the votes: illegal aliens had voted, dead people had voted, and Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked as the accusations come from Trump’s Big Lie team and numerous accounts including Grisham’s.
Of course none of it was true but that didn’t prevent them from trying to press the local officials in the center of the battleground state maps like Arizona and Georgia. “I was for Trump the whole time. And then it started. The steal,” says Rusty Bowers, a former speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives.
Bowers endured enormous confrontation from both the president and Giuliani to join in on the illegal plan of swapping the electoral votes of the state with those of people willing to vote for Trump. The Arizonan remembers being with Giuliani in person and Bowers challenging Giuliani with regards to the existence of fraud in the elections. “Rudy, do you have the evidence? ‘Sure, sure!’ [Then Jenna] ‘Wait, I think I left it at the hotel.’”
Like many other people who did not support the lies, Bowers was also doxed and received threats by the hordes of Trump supporters. The documentary explains that in this regard Bowers belongs to a group of Republican statesmen who could not support other statesmen but not in a cheap way.
Former Arizona Atty. Gen. Mark Brnovich was also one of the Trump fans as he marched towards the 2020 elections. ‘President Trump did a fabulous job,’ he remarks on the movie. ‘I was right there with him. Then he called me saying “you’ll be the most popular man in the world once you start saying there’s fraud or you go and find the fraud.” Brnovich did not submit to these telephone demands of Trump, but he also did not look into the issue of fake electors.
Nevertheless, the filmmakers placed Raffensperger, members of Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Clint Hickman, and Bill Gates, and Georgia Election Operations Manager Gabriel Sterling in this group. Marc Short, who was the chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence during the period in question, also gives an interesting perspective on the situation his boss was in dangerous, to say the least.
Trump’s attorney and insurrection architect John Eastman is actually one of those in the film that still insist the Big Lie is the Truth. “Qanoon Shaman” Jacob Chesley was also there [in the film]. January 6 saw Chesley half naked in a horned helmet, painted with red, white, and blue. He’s been quoted far too many times to give him space here.
Stalwarts of democracy reshaped history and went through a challenge. Placing this event in the calendar of history would be easy, but “Stopping the Steal” set out a clear objective. “I think January 6 is like the trailer to a movie,” Gresham notes. “That’s the one thing with Donald Trump that I’ve learned. You think he’ll just go this far and there’s not more. There’s always more. He takes it as far as it will go.”
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