Getting people to watch a documentary about the Big Lie is a difficult task. Who wants to relive that horrible chapter of American 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 as it is about that other election that put Joe Biden in office and then-President Trump on the warpath. The 90-minute film, which premieres Tuesday at 9 p.m. on HBO, explores the depth and veracity of Trump’s plan to overturn the election results through firsthand accounts from 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 portrait of Trump’s brazen plan to try to steal the election and what it took to prevent 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 approaching. “In late summer, President Trump starts looking for excuses for whether he lost,” says Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served in 2020 as White House strategic communications director and assistant to the president. And the film cuts to a summer press conference where the former president proclaims, “This election will be fraudulent. It will be rigged or manipulated.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin, White House director of strategic communications in 2020, in a scene from HBO’s “Stopping the Steal.”
(HBO)
Spanning from the insurrection of January 6, 2021, to the present, the film chronologically explores how Trump attempted to cling to the presidential office, no matter the cost. News and events we already know about — Trump’s vaguely threatening call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding that he “find” the president the votes he needed and Trump’s private admissions that he knew he had lost to Biden — are given new light through the accounts of those who stood between Trump and his nefarious plans.
“Until the elections, you could always appeal to their personal interests: 'Mr. President, this is a bad idea.' for youThis will hurt you“That would work if you appealed to his self-interest. That’s what helped keep things within bounds,” says former Attorney General William Barr, who served under the Trump administration.
Barr says Trump embarked on a “destructive” campaign that reached new levels of depravity immediately after projections that Biden had won the election. “At 2 a.m. [Trump held a news conference]“For him to come out and say that fraud was being committed was very dangerous. From that point on, I started to get very worried,” Barr says.
Former US Attorney General William Barr also appears in the documentary.
(HBO)
Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump campaign and White House official, says that when the president insisted on the falsehood that the election had been rigged, his staff probably knew better. Yet they played along because no one wanted to be the target of his wrath. “I guarantee you that anyone who was around him at the time, despite what they were thinking inside, was like, ‘Oh, lord, it was stolen,’” Grisham says.
The film juxtaposes accounts like Grisham’s with footage of Trump and his Big Lie team (which included Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell) hurling accusations about vote tampering by election workers, voting by “illegal aliens” and dead people, and claims that Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic voting machines had been hacked.
None of that was true, of course, but that didn’t stop them from leaning on local officials in key states like Arizona and Georgia. “I was for Trump the whole time… and then it all started. The steal,” says former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers.
Bowers faced intense pressure from the president and Giuliani to go along with their illegal plan to replace the state’s slate of electors with ones that would elect Trump. The Arizonan recalls an in-person meeting with Giuliani, where Bowers asked him for proof of voter fraud. “Rudy, do you have the proof? Yeah, yeah!” [Then Jenna said] “Oh, I left it at the hotel.”
Like many others who refused to back up the false accusations, Bowers was the victim of threats and disclosures of personal information by legions of Trump supporters. The film makes clear that Bowers is among the Republican officials who remained true to their principles, though often at great personal cost.
Former Arizona Assembly Speaker Rusty Bowers testifies at a hearing on the January 6 and post-election actions of former President Trump.
(FedNet)
Former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich was another ardent Trump supporter ahead of the 2020 election. “President Trump did a great job,” he says in the film. “I was there with him. [Then] “He called me and said, ‘Hey, you’re going to be the most popular guy in America. You can run for president. All you have to do is say there’s fraud or find some fraud.’” Brnovich did not succumb to Trump’s demands, but neither did she investigate the fake voter scheme.
But others in the film did risk everything to protect democracy, including Raffensperger; Maricopa County Board of Supervisors appointees Clint Hickman and Bill Gates; and Georgia’s director of election operations, Gabriel Sterling. Marc Short, then Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, also offers a poignant look at his former boss’s dangerous and precarious position.
Among those featured in the film who continue to insist that the Big Lie is the Truth are Trump lawyer and insurrection architect John Eastman. Also featured is self-proclaimed “QAnon shaman” Jacob Chansley. You may remember seeing images of Chansley on January 6, shirtless, wearing a furry, horned helmet and his face painted red, white and blue. No citation needed here.
We’ve lived through this history, so “Stop the Steal” isn’t a cautionary tale, but it is a powerful reminder of what we should prepare for next. “I think January 6th is like a movie trailer,” Grisham says. “That’s the one thing I’ve learned with Donald Trump. You think you’re going to go so far and there’s no more. There’s always more. He takes things as far as he can.”
