As early as 2019, Trump had “joked” about staying in power regardless of the election results, and in summer 2020, as his numbers plummeted, he floated the idea of delaying the election. Republican lawmakers still didn’t make a stand against him. But in a sign that he had little faith that Trump would pull off a win, Mitch McConnell pushed through the confirmation of a third right-wing Trump appointee to the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, on October 31, when balloting was already under way for the November 3 election.
On that same day, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon told a private audience that Trump was going to declare that he had won the 2020 election no matter what. Trump knew that Democratic mail-in ballots would show up in the vote totals later than Republican votes cast on Election Day, creating a “red mirage” that would be overtaken later by Democratic votes. “Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said, by calling the election early and saying that the later votes were somehow illegitimate. “That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” Bannon continued: “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again. . . . He’s gonna say ‘F*ck you. How about that?’ Because . . . he’s done his last election.”[1]
That’s almost how it played out.
Early returns on the evening of Election Day 2020, November 3, showed Trump with leads. But, more quickly than anyone expected, Democratic votes turned the key state of Arizona blue, and the Fox News Channel called the race for Biden. Furious, Trump took to the airwaves at about two-thirty the next morning and declared he had won, although ballots were still being counted and several battleground states had no clear winner. “We won’t stand for this,” he told supporters, assuring them he had won. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”[2]
But it didn’t, and by the time all the ballots were counted, the election was not close: Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, the exact same Electoral College margin Trump had declared a landslide when it favored him in 2016.
Trump publicly insisted the election had been rigged, although his own attorney general, William Barr, who had been a steadfast defender, said the election was legitimate and the conspiracy theories his team was advancing were “ridiculous.” But Trump refused to let go of the lie that he had won and, crucially, was able to find allies in Republican leadership willing to help him overturn American democracy, either by actively helping or by staying silent.
Over the next few months, the Trump campaign challenged the election by demanding recounts—all of which confirmed that Biden had won. Trump or his surrogates filed and lost at least sixty-three lawsuits over the 2020 election, most of which were dismissed for lack of evidence. And yet right-wing media continued to hype the idea that the election was stolen, and election officials and ballot counters received death threats.
Trump and his allies also held informational sessions with state legislators to convince them they had the power to disregard the will of the voters and choose their own electors. Notably, Trump’s allies pressured officials in Georgia to throw out the votes from Democratic-leaning Fulton County. When they failed to do so, Trump himself got on the phone with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger and told him: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”[3]
As legal challenges failed, Trump’s allies turned to a plan advanced by right-wing lawyer Kenneth Chesebro and turned into a memo by lawyer John Eastman, a professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law in California. It called for Trump supporters in seven battleground states to meet secretly and submit a false slate of electors for Trump to Congress and the National Archives. Then, on January 6, when it came time for Vice President Mike Pence to count the electoral votes from the 2020 election, making Democrat Joe Biden president, he could refuse to count the electors from the apparently contested states.
That would mean either that Trump would be elected outright or that Democrats would put up such a fight that Pence could say there was no clear winner and send the election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. Since there were more Republican delegations than Democratic ones, Trump would be president.
This was an extraordinary rejection of the theory of democracy—that voters have a right to choose their leaders—but Trump loyalists believed they were in the right. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Trump’s evangelical chief of staff, Mark Meadows, wrote on November 24, 2020, to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, who urged state legislators to sign on to the false elector scheme. Meadows continued: “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues.”[4]
When Pence refused to participate in the plan—likely knowing that if the coup failed, he’d be the one left holding the bag—Trump fell back on the old tactic of spreading a false narrative through an investigation. He plotted to name Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer for the environmental division of the Justice Department, as attorney general. Clark planned to announce to the battleground state legislatures that the Department of Justice was “investigating various irregularities” in the election—this was a lie—and that they should choose a new set of electors. Only the threat that the entire leadership of the Department of Justice would resign made Trump back down.
Republicans had gone along with the charade that the election had been stolen, seemingly hoping to pick up Trump’s supporters for their own political ambitions. In the House, especially, Trump’s allies began to echo his accusations and to say they would question the counts from certain states. Such challenges required a paired vote with a senator, and McConnell tried hard to hold his conference from joining the radicals in the House. It didn’t work. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who saw himself as a top 2024 presidential contender, and Ted Cruz of Texas, who didn’t want to be undercut, led eleven other senators in a revolt to challenge the ballots. McConnell had lost control of his conference; Trump now called the shots.
On January 3, all ten living former defense secretaries signed an op-ed in The Washington Post warning that any “efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.” They also seemed to put colleagues on notice: “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”[5]
But Trump was still not out of cards to play. He had been courting right-wing mobs since August 2017 and had openly turned to them during the campaign, telling the Proud Boys in September, for example, to “stand back and stand by.” Then, on December 19, frustrated by his inability to get the election overturned, Trump tweeted to his supporters that it was “statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”[6]
At the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, held at the Ellipse near the White House, Trump and his surrogates told the crowd that they had won the election, and he warned: “We are going to have to fight much harder.” He claimed that Chinese-driven socialists were taking over the country and assured the crowd: “We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy.” He told them, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated. . . . And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.”[7]
And, knowing they were armed, he told them to march to the Capitol.
The violent attack on the United States government that followed brought to life the mythological history that the Republicans had come to celebrate, tying Trump’s authoritarianism to the Republicans’ embrace of America’s unequal past. Trading “1776” slogans, the Trump Republicans who attacked the Capitol believed they were writing a new history of the United States, one that finally embraced the hierarchical version of American history claimed by the Confederates before them. After decades of feeding hungry voters ideas and images straight out of the nation’s white supremacist past, Republican politicians and pundits had created a mob determined to end American democracy. One of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops of the 1860s had never been able to: he carried the Confederate battle flag into the United States Capitol.
From their hiding spots, lawmakers begged the president to call off his supporters, but he did nothing for more than three hours. After 5:40 p.m., when the National Guard had been deployed without his orders, thus making it clear the rioters would be overpowered before either taking over the government themselves or giving him an excuse to declare martial law, Trump issued a video statement.
“I know you’re hurt,” he said. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now. . . . We love you. You’re very special.”[8] He tweeted: “Remember this day forever!”[9]