The crowd wasn’t quite sure what to think.
Donald Trump, the unlikeliest major party presidential nominee in more than a century, had drawn several thousand people to the Greater Columbus Convention Center. They laughed at his jokes, they chanted “Lock Her Up!” about Hillary Clinton, they seemed to think Mexico might pay for a border wall. They did not expect to hear that the most basic and vital element of American democracy was a sham.
After suggesting that the process might be rigged, Trump declared that he had been hearing “more and more” that the election might not be contested fairly, though before elaborating further, he changed the subject to a tangent about one of his first real estate deals, in (somewhat) nearby Cincinnati.
He made his incendiary accusation after suggesting that the Democrats had fixed their primary system so Clinton could defeat Bernie Sanders, making some wild link to a batch of hacked emails from the national party that appeared to indicate a preference for the former secretary of state. But emails aside, Clinton had received 3.7 million more votes than Sanders nationwide and had established a clear lead in delegates months before her party’s convention, which had concluded just days earlier in Philadelphia.
This followed Trump’s own evidence-less claim that the Republican nomination would have been stolen from him had he not won by significant margins. Part of his pitch was that he was an outsider, someone who was not from Washington and not beholden to its traditions and informal and formal rules. He wielded that status as a weapon, and at times made it appear that he was running in opposition to the Republican Party as much as representing it.
He accused the GOP of plotting against him, with claims that the system was fixed against him becoming frequent catchphrases during low-water marks of his primary campaign, months earlier, first when he lost Iowa and then when forces allied with Republican rival Ted Cruz managed to pack state delegations with supporters of the Texas senator. He claimed that the whole thing was “rigged” and also asserted that the Republican Party had changed the delegate allocation in the Florida primary to favor a native candidate, like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, at Trump’s expense.
The celebrity businessman had long been known to dabble in conspiracy theories, including jump-starting his political career by falsely claiming that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and then, incredibly, that Cruz’s father was hanging out with President John F. Kennedy’s assassin (he was not). But this was the first time Trump had asserted that November’s general election might not be on the up-and-up.
And it wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, a stray thought that crossed his lips, never to be uttered again. Those happened plenty. But veteran Trump watchers knew from hundreds of campaign rallies that if one of his sentiments played well with the crowd—the candidate, truly skilled in reading a room, liked to test material on the audience, like a comic workshopping a joke—it could then become part of his nightly routine.
And truly, his campaign was, at its heart, just one rally to the next: outside of a few core tenets (the nation’s trade deals were bad, its immigration system worse), there was very little in the way of political philosophy to Trump. The core goal was simply to seize attention, to get the crowd to cheer, to spawn a cable news chyron, to dominate Twitter, to own the libs.
And Trump stuck to this idea, repeating the charge that night on Fox News channel’s Hannity: “I’m telling you, November eighth, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us.
“I’ve been hearing about it for a long time,” Trump continued. “And I just hope that there’s really—I hope the Republicans get out there and watch very closely because I think we are going to win this election.”
The host did not push back. They rarely did.
Trump’s lies did not remain confined to the rally stage. They needed life; they needed amplification. He did some of that himself, via his Twitter account, which was in the early stages of a five-year reign as the most potent political weapon on the planet, one that would rattle global capitals, leave political foes cowering in fear, and, at times, weigh in on pressing matters like the quality of Diet Coke. But he needed accomplices, he needed coconspirators, he needed a way to reach those who did not live their lives 140 characters at a time.
He needed cable news.
Every network was guilty of giving Trump too much time, including those without conservative leanings. He was a welcome guest on panel shows, even if conversations got contentious, and his rallies received wall-to-wall coverage, far more than any other Republican candidate. His rivals cried out that it was unfair, but the networks didn’t care. Trump was compelling TV; people couldn’t look away. Trump was ratings gold.
But it was conservative media, and Fox News in particular, with which Trump eventually formed a symbiotic relationship. It’s true that Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, which ran Fox News, was at first deeply skeptical of Trump. But the programming didn’t reflect that. In Fox, Trump had a huge platform: the number one cable channel in the country, and one on which he was never challenged. One that gave him free media and, often enough, regurgitated his lies.
Fox News became a wing of the Trump campaign. The celebrity maybe-billionaire called in at will to its morning show Fox & Friends and then later did the same with his prime-time pal Sean Hannity. As Trump took power, stations launched and rebranded themselves, catering to those for whom Fox News just wasn’t conservative enough. Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN) each grabbed a foothold with those on the Right and showed a willingness to parrot Trump’s lies.
And he lied a lot. He lied about his wealth. He lied about his sex life. He lied about how many times he was on the cover of Time magazine, hanging a fake on the walls of his New Jersey and Florida golf courses. He repeatedly claimed things that did not happen. He said Obama was born in Kenya, then falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign team had started the “birther” movement that questioned Obama’s origins. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrate the collapse of the World Trade Center after the attacks on September 11, 2001. He said Russian president Vladimir Putin called him a “genius” when in fact Putin called him something like “colorful” or “bright.”
He lived in his own world and created his own reality. He refused to accept hard truths. He appeared to think that if he just said things over and over, he could will them into reality—and persuade his followers to believe them. At times, it was hard to know whether he knew he was lying or if he had somehow convinced himself of the alternate, and incorrect, reality.
Steve Bannon, the conservative provocateur who ran Breitbart News, took over the Trump campaign for its 2016 stretch run and then spent a tumultuous seven months inside the White House as the president’s chief strategist. A firebrand whose website would run sensational and at times offensive headlines, who derided the media as the “opposition party” but happily spoke off the record to reporters to help shape their stories, Bannon was not shy about coloring or shading the truth.
But even for Bannon, Trump was something new. The chief strategist told me that Trump “was not looking to win a news cycle, he was looking to win a news moment, a news second.” An at-times shell-shocked Bannon would relay to aides that “Trump would say anything, he would lie about anything to win that moment, to win whatever exchange he was having at that moment.” Entire campaign proposals had to be written on the fly, policy plans reverse engineered, teams of aides immediately mobilized to meet whatever floated through Trump’s head in that moment to defend his record, put down a reporter, or change a chyron on CNN.
A hurricane map had to be redrawn after the president made a mistake. A task force was created to fight an imaginary caravan of immigrants that was getting big play on Fox News. A commission was formed to look into whether illegal votes had cost him the popular vote.
And so much of it—so, so, so much of it—was to avoid the impression that Trump was wrong. Or, more dangerously, that he was a loser.
Donald John Trump hates losing. He hates the idea of appearing weak, hates that anyone might think he was not as rich/handsome/skinny/smart/successful/well-endowed as would be required to perpetuate the gold-plated Trump brand. He hated being laughed at.
His campaign was based on a central idea that the world was laughing at the United States, that the once-mighty and respected nation had fallen so steeply that it had become nothing but a global joke. “The world is laughing at us,” he said in May 2016. “They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity.”
Who was doing the laughing? It varied by the day, but it could be China or Mexico or the Arab League or OPEC or Vladimir Putin. His great fear was to be the subject of ridicule, which is why, aides would later say, one of his angriest moments in office was at the United Nations in September 2018 when, with typical hyperbole, he declared, “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
He drew audible laughter from the heads of state from around the world. Trump, taken aback, paused, and said, “Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay,” and went ahead with his speech. He later screamed at his aides.
He couldn’t stand being bested; he always had to have an excuse at the ready. When Trump Tower was eclipsed as the tallest building in its section of Midtown Manhattan, he simply renumbered the floors in the elevator. The fifty-seventh floor became the sixty-seventh, the fifty-eighth-floor penthouse became the sixty-eighth, and so on. Voilà! The building had not grown an inch, but in the Trump Organization’s promotional materials, it suddenly was sixty-eight floors. Still the tallest.
When pundits roundly declared him the loser, to Hillary Clinton, of the first general election debate in September 2016, Trump was ready with an excuse: his microphone was not working properly. When he didn’t want his tax returns released for fear they would reveal that he was worth a lot less than he claimed—and potentially showcase the true sources of his wealth—he said the IRS had been auditing him for years (it wasn’t) and that he couldn’t release them (he could). He simply couldn’t publicly face the possibility of being defeated or shamed.
And maybe that’s all that day in Columbus was, some thought.
Maybe Trump had glanced at the polls that morning, which showed him down an average of four and a half points to Clinton with just over three months until Election Day. Maybe he saw a defeat coming, the same expectation that would lead aides to hurriedly scramble to write an acceptance speech on Election Night because no one had thought he could win. Maybe the statement was simply Trump’s effort to lay the groundwork of an excuse if he went on to lose the general election.
But if it was a deception, he didn’t immediately let aides into his thinking. Later that day, as his private jet made the short flight to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for his next rally, a few of his senior aides, including press secretary Hope Hicks and head of security Keith Schiller, raised the question of fears of a rigged election.
Trump snapped that it was a threat, that “Many people have told me that it’s happening, that they are going to steal it from us.”
Schiller, a grizzled former New York cop who was rarely not by his boss’s side, nodded agreement. Hicks was in some ways an unusual part of Trump’s core group, a twenty-seven-year-old former model from Connecticut who had first worked for the candidate’s daughter Ivanka. She wondered if the idea came from a conservative news host, maybe other Republicans on the ground in battleground states? Mr. Trump didn’t elaborate. But Mr. Trump was usually right, she thought.
If Trump were to be defeated in November and then to publicly declare that the election results were bogus, his claim could yield unpredictable reactions from his supporters and fellow Republicans. His musings in Ohio and on Hannity would soon become a rally routine, one that would be repeated night after night in front of thousands.
He did not yet have the Republican Party fully in his grasp. There were some, as the campaign entered its stretch run, who hoped Trump would be an aberration, that his populism and obscenity would fade away. But Trump saw the moment differently. It was a prod, a test. How far would the party go with him? The GOP leadership was uncertain.
Its voters were not.
The line outside Trump’s second stop that August day—Cumberland Valley High School in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania—stretched for blocks beyond the school’s parking lot.
Trump often boasted to the crowds inside his rallies that far more people were waiting outside, unable to get in. Often, that wasn’t true. But it was accurate that day, as reporters in the motorcade nudged each other and took note of the size of the crowd in a state that had become Republicans’ white whale, one in which they spent an extraordinary amount of time and money but hadn’t won since 1988.
Trump’s crowds, he always bragged, were far bigger than those Clinton drew. How much they mattered was the subject of fierce debate; political reporters and operatives alike could remember four years before, when Mitt Romney had drawn megacrowds in his campaign’s final days, including more than thirty thousand near Pittsburgh, and how his aides had told everyone that he’d won. He lost the popular vote by nearly four points to Obama.
But surely the crowds meant something. It must have meant something in October when Trump drew twenty thousand to a rally in Tampa and, just a few days and 280 miles away across the state, Clinton attracted only a few hundred people in Miami. It must have meant something—what seemed to be the sheer size of the energy gap—that Trump was drawing bigger and louder audiences.
Born into wealth and living in a penthouse atop a Manhattan skyscraper emblazoned with his name in gold, Trump was the least likely representative of deep-red America. But he struck a chord and spoke to people’s anger about immigration and political correctness. To some, it was undeniable: he gave voice to their darkest, sometimes racist thoughts, their fear and hatred of the Other. For other white voters, he seemed to bring to light the frustration of being forgotten, of living at a time in America when it was no longer sure that your children would have a better life than your own. When you hadn’t had a raise in ten years or when the factory that employed seemingly half the town shut down. When opioids were everywhere, even in the hands of your own teenager. When suicides and overdoses were up. When the post–Great Recession recovery worked out fine for others but passed you by. When the elites got richer and smarter and more arrogant. And when the government moved to help them, the immigrants, the people of color, and gave them an unfair advantage over you, the hardworking American who got left behind and didn’t get a fair share.
Clinton was in a race for history, aiming to become the first woman president, and the power of that barrier potentially breaking could not be overstated. But Clinton also had been in Americans’ lives for decades; there was little new to learn, as voters’ opinions about her had hardened long before. She had been vilified by the Right for years, by Republicans and in the conservative media. Among conservatives, a whole cottage industry was born that seemed intent on floating the wildest possible conspiracy theory about her and her husband. She was a victim of extraordinary sexism. Even some who voted for her did so unenthusiastically.
For decades, she had loomed on the Right as a bogey(wo)man. Far more than her husband, she was the target of the conservatives’ venom. She was seen as the puppet master, pulling the strings behind the scenes. The deep national political polarization that Trump accelerated had its origins decades earlier and really exploded in the late 1990s, when the Right—with the aid of the new cable network Fox News—seized upon the Clintons as an existential threat to their values. No conspiracy was too far-fetched: murder, rape, pedophilia. Hillary Clinton, a brilliant, successful, accomplished woman, was triggering, and that only grew after her husband left office and her own presidency appeared a possibility. She was blamed for a terror attack in Benghazi; she was accused of being in league with socialists.
Lots of people hated Trump too, in what became a race of two candidates with the highest unfavorability ratings in modern times. But polls after the election showed that, among voters who disliked both candidates, far more broke for Trump. They had their doubts, but they wanted to try something new, someone brash who seemed to understand and vocalize their frustrations.
And in many ways, Clinton was the perfect foil for Trump. Trump played into voters’ worst instincts when it came to racism and sexism. He could be elected only as a reaction to the nation’s first Black president and its first potentially winning female candidate. And some of the tactics being considered to stop her set a template for what would happen five years later.
Roger Stone was, by reputation and his own admission, a dirty trickster. His résumé is almost too audacious to examine: He worked for Richard Nixon and later tattooed a giant image of the disgraced thirty-seventh president on his back. He later, along with his partner Paul Manafort, founded a Washington lobbyist firm that specialized in representing clients no one else would touch. He helped bring down Eliot Spitzer, associated with the Proud Boys, and found himself the subject of a 2019 FBI raid based on charges of witness tampering and lying to investigators.
He also was Donald Trump’s first political adviser.
He tried unsuccessfully to get Trump to run several times before 2016 and was one of the first staffers aboard the celebrity developer’s eventual campaign. He didn’t stay in the official role long—Stone says he quit, Trump says he fired him—but the political provocateur didn’t go far, always remaining in Trump’s orbit and on the other end of the phone. Eventually, he—and Manafort, who went on to run Trump’s campaign for a while in 2016—was pardoned by Trump in the waning days of his term.
And it was Stone who, the week of Trump’s Ohio rally, amplified the message; Stone who would make the direct link between the seemingly harmless words uttered from a convention center stage to the insurrection at the United States Capitol.
“I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly,” said Stone in an interview with a Breitbart producer that was largely ignored by the mainstream media but picked up significant traction on the Right.
“He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’”
As if gazing into a warped crystal ball, Stone got the candidate wrong but offered a foreboding preview of one of the darkest days in America’s history, predicting what would happen if Trump’s supporters believed his victory had been stolen.
“The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it.”
The crowd in Mechanicsburg, wearing their red “Make America Great Again” hats, was fired up, nearly drowning out Trump as he spoke.
They were the voters—mostly white and working class—whom Trump had drawn into the system. A number of them told reporters that day that they had not voted in decades or had never voted before. But they were going to this year; they were going to vote for him, they’d say, as they pointed to the stage. Trump had struck a chord with them.
And they were willing to follow Trump, to believe him when he said that the system was biased against them. Others got the handouts, got the leg up. The establishment—from government to media to Wall Street to Hollywood to Silicon Valley—was designed to keep the rich and well-connected in power and regular folks out. And maybe, just maybe, the elites would rig an election to do so.
The rest of that rally in Pennsylvania passed uneventfully. But the threat of a rigged election became a theme of Trump’s closing argument, as the campaign moved into its stretch run. The fear that the race could be stolen manifested itself in a new and dangerous way, and Trump would soon do the unthinkable for an American presidential candidate: he would not commit to honoring the results of the election. He refused to promise that he would concede if he lost.
He hammered home the theme night after night, even after his candidacy was nearly derailed by the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which he was heard boasting about sexually assaulting women. That moment was the closest that the Republican Party ever came to severing itself from Trump. But while some in the GOP abandoned him, his followers did not, and he soon recovered in the polls to again draw close to Clinton heading into their third and final debate, on a sweltering late October night in Las Vegas.
About two-thirds of the way through the debate, the moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, turned to Trump.
“Your running mate, Governor Pence, pledged on Sunday that he and you, his words, will absolutely accept the result of this election,” Wallace said. “Today your daughter Ivanka said the same thing. I want to ask you here on the stage tonight: Do you make the same commitment that you’ll absolutely accept the result of this election?”
Trump glared at him. His answer drew gasps from the audience.
“I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time,” he said. “What I’ve seen, what I’ve seen, is so bad.”
Wallace tried to interrupt twice, but Trump kept going, reciting unproven allegations about voter rolls and media bias. When the anchor finally jumped in, his voice was a mix of frustration, incredulity, and concern.
“But, sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner,” Wallace said. “Not saying you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?”
Trump almost seemed to sneer in response.
“What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?”
As the audience murmured, Clinton jumped in.
“Chris, let me respond to that because that’s horrifying. You know, every time Donald thinks things aren’t going in his direction, he claims whatever it is, is rigged against him,” she said. She then ticked off some of Trump’s claims about his Iowa caucus defeat, his Wisconsin primary loss, a legal defeat for Trump University, all setbacks Trump deemed unfair.
“There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him,” she said.
“Should have gotten it,” Trump said to laughter. Clinton was not amused.
“This is a mindset. This is how Donald thinks, and it’s funny, but it’s also really troubling. That is not the way our democracy works,” she said. “We’ve been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”
When the night ended, the talk was of Trump’s refusal to promise to honor the results of the election. Two of the cable channels (MSNBC and CNN) treated it as an existential threat to democracy, the third (Fox News) decidedly less so. Headlines screamed, ledes blared, all about Trump threatening to violate one of the sacred tenets of the nation’s democracy.
It still seemed unreal. Would Trump really refuse to concede? Would some of his followers actually not accept Clinton’s election? Surely, pundits thought, Trump would walk away if he lost.
Trump, of course, didn’t lose. But a step had been taken, a journey toward Republicans seizing upon false claims of voter fraud to restrict ballot access, forcing Democrats to make voting rights the defining political issue of the decade.
But a step was also taken toward violence, a step toward the events of January 6, 2021.