Getting folks to watch a documentary about the Big Lie is a Big Ask. Who wants to relive that horrible chapter in America’s political history, especially while we’re writing a new, possibly less-horrible chapter?
Despite its title, HBO’s “Stopping the Steal” is as much about what lies ahead of us as it is about that other election that put Joe Biden in office and then-President Trump on a warpath. The 90-minute film, which premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, explores the depth and veracity of Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results through the first-hand accounts of the people who were there.
The collective stories of former Trump appointees, staffers and Republican elected officials, who worked and served behind the scenes in the months before and after the election, paint a picture of Trump’s brazen scheme to try to steal the election and what it took to stop him and his allies from succeeding.
Directed by Dan Reed (“The Truth vs. Alex Jones”), “Stopping the Steal” takes viewers back to July 2020, when the president’s popularity was slipping and the election was looming. “By late summer, President Trump starts to grease the wheels for excuses if he lost,” says Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served in 2020 as White House director of strategic communications and assistant to the president. And the film cuts to a summer presser where the former president proclaims, “These elections will be fraudulent. They’ll be fixed or rigged.”
Spanning to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the film explores chronologically how Trump attempted to hang onto the presidential office, no matter the cost. News and events we’re already familiar with — Trump’s vaguely threatening call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding he “find” the president the votes he needed and Trump’s private admissions that he knew he lost to Biden — take on a new light through the accounts of those who stood between Trump and his nefarious plans.
“Up until the election, you could always appeal to his self-interest — ‘Mr. President, this is a bad idea for you. This will hurt you,’” says former Atty. Gen. William Barr, who served under Trump. “That would work if you appealed to his self-interest. That is what helped keep things within the guardrails.”
Barr says Trump embarked on a “destructive” campaign that reached new levels of depravity immediately following projections that Biden had won the election. “At 2 in the morning [Trump held a news conference], and for him to go out and claim that fraud was underway, it was very dangerous. I started worrying a lot from then on,” Barr says.
Former Trump campaign and White House official Stephanie Grisham says when the president doubled down on the falsehood that the election was rigged, his staff likely knew better. They played along, though, because no one wanted to be the target of his anger. “I guarantee anyone that was around him at the time, despite what they were thinking inside, they were saying, ‘Oh it was stolen, sir,’” Grisham says.
The film juxtaposes accounts such as Grisham’s with footage of Trump and his Big Lie team (who included Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell) spewing accusations about ballot tampering by poll workers, voting by “illegal aliens” and deceased people, and claims that Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines had been hacked.
None of it was true, of course, but that didn’t stop them from leaning on local officials in critical swing states such as Arizona and Georgia. “I was for Trump the whole time … and then it started. The steal,” says former Arizona House of Representatives Speaker Rusty Bowers.
Bowers faced intense pressure from the president and Giuliani to go along with their illegal scheme to replace the state’s slate of electors with ones who would elect Trump. The Arizonan recalls an in-person meeting with Giuliani, where Bowers asked for evidence of election fraud. “Rudy, you have the proof?’ Yeah, yeah!’ [Then Jenna said] ‘Oh, I left it back at the hotel.’”
Like many others who refused to prop up the false allegations, Bowers was doxxed and threatened by legions of Trump’s supporters. The film makes it clear that Bowers is among the Republican officials who stood by their principles, but often at great personal cost.
Former Arizona Atty. Gen. Mark Brnovich was another avid Trump supporter heading into the 2020 election. “President Trump did a great job,” he says in the film. “I was right there with him. [Then] he called me and said, ‘Hey, you’ll be the most popular guy in America. You’ll be able to run for president. All you gotta do is say there’s fraud or find some fraud.’” Brnovich didn’t succumb to Trump’s demands, but he also didn’t investigate the matter of the fake electors scheme.
Other participants in the film, however, did put it all on the line to protect democracy, including Raffensperger; Maricopa County Board of Supervisors appointees Clint Hickman and Bill Gates; and Georgia Election Operations Manager Gabriel Sterling. Marc Short, then chief of staff for Vice President Mike Pence, also offers gripping insight into his former boss’ dangerous and precarious position.
Among those in the film who still insist the Big Lie is the Truth are Trump attorney and insurrection architect John Eastman. Also making an appearance is self-proclaimed “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley. You may remember seeing footage of Chansley on Jan. 6, shirtless, clad in a furry, horned helmet and sporting red, white and blue face paint. There’s no need to quote him here.
We’ve lived through this story, so “Stopping the Steal” isn’t a cautionary tale. But it is a powerful reminder of what we should prepare for. “I think Jan. 6 is like the trailer to a movie,” Grisham says. “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.”