explainer

Trump's Long Campaign to Steal the Presidency: A Timeline

The insurrection was a complex, yearslong plot, not a i-mean solar day outcome. And it isn't over.

President Donald Trump arrives to accost the Stop the Steal rally about the White House on January 6, 2021. Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Getty Images

President Donald Trump arrives to address the Stop the Steal rally almost the White Firm on January six, 2021. Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Getty Images

President Donald Trump arrives to address the Terminate the Steal rally near the White Business firm on January six, 2021. Photograph: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Getty Images

In the year since the Capitol Riot, the House select committee investigation and various media reports explaining what Donald Trump and his allies were doing in the days immediately leading up to the attack have cast new light on an important threat to American democracy. Only the intense focus on a few wild days in Washington can be misleading also. Trump's campaign to steal the 2022 presidential ballot began shortly later the 2022 election, and arguably the moment of peak peril for Joe Biden's inauguration had already passed past the fourth dimension Trump addressed the Stop the Steal rally on January vi.

A total timeline of the attempted coup is helpful in putting Trump's frantic, last-infinitesimal schemes into the proper context and countering the false impression that January half-dozen was an improvised, impossible-to-replicate event, rather than 1 office of an ongoing campaign. If Congress fails to seize its cursory opportunity to reform our electoral system, the danger could recur in future elections — perhaps with a unlike, catastrophic effect.

Epitomizing the rare miracle of the sore winner, Trump insisted in tardily Nov 2022 that he would have won the pop vote as well as the Electoral College "if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." He repeated the prevarication for years and even claimed falsely in a June 2022 interview withMeet the Press that California "admitted" information technology had counted "a 1000000" illegal votes.

This wasn't just a tossed-off random Trumpian fabrication. His insistence that Democrats had deployed ineligible (and probably noncitizen) voters led to his date of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017. The committee was ostensibly led by Vice-President Mike Pence but was more than closely identified with its co-chairman Kris Kobach, the immigrant-bashing, vote-suppressing secretarial assistant of Land of Kansas. As David Daley explains, information technology was a wide-ranging angling expedition that caught exactly null fish:

Kobach's plan was easy to discern: The commission was to be the forepart through which a cabal of shadowy Republican activists and oft-debunked academics, backed by misleading studies, laundered their phony voting-fraud theories into a justification for real-world suppression tactics such as national voter ID and massive coast-to-coast electoral-roll purges.

The committee was soon disbanded empty-handed, with Kobach & Co. blaming its failure on noncooperation from states that refused to turn over voters' personal information. But in MAGA Land, wild voter-fraud claims become more credible each time they are repeated, so the commission was a sound investment in future lies.

In an effort to spin Republican losses in the 2022 midterm elections, House GOP leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy seized on four contests in California in which Republicans led in early vote counting just lost when late mail ballots came in. Without alleging (much less proving) anything in detail, congressional Republicans suggested skullduggery in what was a normal trend in the counting of entirely legal ballots signed and mailed before Ballot Twenty-four hours but received afterward. I dismissed this GOP spin, which McCarthy was still pushing a year afterwards, just warned that "all this ex post facto delegitimization of elections that [Republicans] lost sounds similar a clothes rehearsal for how they'll behave if they do poorly again next twelvemonth."

The president himself made similar allegations after the 2022 midterms, though he focused on two races the GOP eventually won. On Veterans 24-hour interval, Trump declared that Florida'south Senate and governor's race should be chosen in favor of the Republicans who were alee on Election Night, though legally bandage overseas military and civilian mail service ballots had still to be counted. He tweeted, falsely, that these "massively infected" ballots had shown up "out of nowhere" and thus must be ignored:

The Florida Ballot should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Ballot Nighttime!

This did, indeed, turn out to be a dress rehearsal. Trump went on to make nearly identical charges nearly late-arriving (or merely late-counted) mail ballots on Ballot Night 2020.

Every bit the COVID-nineteen pandemic spread in 2020, states property primaries and special elections naturally began liberalizing opportunities to vote by mail. Trump went bananas on Twitter in May, threatening to withhold federal funding from Michigan because its secretary of Land had sent absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters.

Twitter, in what was and then an unprecedented activeness, took down two Trump tweets in which he mendaciously attacked California for "sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone … no thing who they are or how they got there." Really, of course, the ballots went merely to registered voters.

Trump's goal seemed clear: Past asserting that voting by mail is tantamount to voter fraud, he was setting up a bogus justification for battling ballot results in any land he lost.

Team Trump's parallel strategy was to get Republicans to eschew voting by mail to ensure that the votes most often counted first (in-person Election Day ballots) would skew red as forcefully as possible (which is why one analyst dubbed the scheme the "Blood-red Delusion"). Every bit Election Day approached, in that location were many signs that, but by attacking voting by mail every bit illegitimate, Trump was succeeding in discouraging his supporters from voting that fashion, thus producing the desired Election Night "skew" in his favor.

In September, Trump'due south hostility to mail ballots and threats to just merits victory became more intense and regular. In his first debate with Biden, on September 30, the program to contest any ballot loss was fabricated plain. Following an breathless diatribe recapping his unfounded claims of rampant voter fraud, Trump was pressed on whether he would urge his supporters to "stay at-home" and "not engage in any civil unrest" during the ballot-counting process, which would likely be fatigued out due to unprecedented levels of voting by post. "Will you pledge this night that you will not declare victory until the ballot has been independently certified?" moderator Chris Wallace asked.

"I'm urging my supporters to go into the polls and sentry very advisedly," Trump replied. "If it's a fair election, I am 100 pct onboard. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can't proceed with that."

With Trump ahead but giving up ground in a number of states he would ultimately lose, he made his long-awaited play. At around 3 a.m. on November four, he concluded his remarks to his supporters by saying:

This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our state. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this ballot. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the police force to be used in a proper manner. So nosotros'll be going to the U.Southward. Supreme Court. Nosotros want all voting to stop. We don't desire them to find any ballots at four o'clock in the morning and add together them to the list. Okay? It's a very sad moment. To me, this is a very lamentable moment, and we volition win this. And equally far as I'm concerned, we already have won it.

It seems plausible that Trump delayed his premature victory merits by a few hours because it initially appeared that he might win legitimately. An "insider" account of Trump's Election Dark activities published in the Washington Postal service aired the theory that his annunciation might have been spurred by a spontaneous suggestion from an inebriated Rudy Giuliani. Merely the many times Trump himself predicted he would exercise exactly this would indicate otherwise.

A steadily changing cast of Trump entrada lawyers, eventually featuring histrionic extremists Giuliani and Sidney Powell, fired off 62 federal and state lawsuits challenging many aspects of the election results. Most were laughably frivolous, and 61 were rejected on widely varying grounds. The one that succeeded, in Pennsylvania, involved a pocket-sized number of ballots with technical errors that a local judge had immune voters to "cure" after a statutory deadline.

At that place were two big opportunities for a Hail Mary from the Supreme Court, simply Trump lost both times. On December 8, the Court refused without comment to hear a claim by Republican congressman Mike Kelly that Pennsylvania's expansion of voting by mail was invalid because it was non enacted past a constitutional amendment. And on December 11, another shot at the merits that land legislatures cannot consul their election powers was rejected past the Court on grounds that the state bringing the arrange had no continuing to challenge procedures in the targeted states (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).

By then, the Trump campaign'south legal effort had descended into total farce, every bit became obvious on November 19 when Giuliani and Powell held a wild press briefing featuring outlandish conspiracy theories, including communist manipulation of voting machines. Both Attorney Full general William Barr and White Firm adviser Jared Kushner reportedly dismissed the Trump legal team'southward efforts as a "clown show," and an internal memo that came out much later also showed the Trump entrada knew most of the allegations fabricated in that presser were bogus.

Arguably the virtually serious Trump try to steal the election involved pleas to Republican legislators in key states won past Biden to dispute the results before they could be certified (the step before the formal award of balloter votes). As of November 21, Trump was publicly making arguments for this extreme remedy, but as Politician observed, it was a long shot from the become-go: "Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won would need to move to overturn their state'due south pop vote and appoint a slate of Trump electors when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14." The opposition of Democratic governors in Michigan and Pennsylvania would have stopped such maneuvers absent an unlikely courtroom finding that legislatures have sole power to appoint electors. And legislators in those two states didn't respond to Trump's requests for help.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia certified their ballot returns by December nine, and on December xiv, presidential electors cast their ballots to make Biden the president-elect.

In another sign that the Trump entrada was thinking ahead to future coup opportunities amidst all the clownishness, it convened unauthorized "Trump electors" in the seven shut states won by Biden on the aforementioned mean solar day the real electors voted, a plot that is now being investigated by the U.Due south. Justice Department for possible criminal liability.

A narrowly-missed opportunity for truly dangerous mischief was revealed in Jan 2022 by the New York Times: Trump looked into various avenues for using the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Securities, or even country agencies, to seize voting machines in guild to investigate vague allegations of election fraud. The DOJ angle was vetoed by Chaser General William Barr. The Pentagon/DHS scheme was promoted by Trump advisor Michael Flynn and Trump entrada attorney Sidney Powell. Ironically, Powell's legal team colleague Rudy Giuliani was instrumental in talking Trump out of going in this management on grounds that it would provoke a second impeachment of the 45th president.

Trump connected his effort to find state politicians willing to help him contrary the election results fifty-fifty after passing every deadline established by Congress over more than a century to cut off presidential-election disputes.

On Dec 5, he called Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who had backed the certification of Biden'due south win, to ask him to convene the state legislature to overturn the results and appoint pro-Trump electors (Kemp declined to do so). On December 23, Trump called Bonnie Watson, a lowly election investigator for Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, urging her to find fault with mail ballots since "I won [Georgia] past hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn't close."

On January 2, 2021, he concluded this particular line of election tampering by appealing direct to Raffensperger to find him some more votes. "So look. All I desire to do is this," the president said in a recorded conversation. "I just desire to discover 11,780 votes, which is one more than than we take. Because we won the state."

Trump was likewise working the state angle from the other management, conspiring in item with Acting Assistant Chaser General Jeffrey Clark to push Republican legislatures to investigate and mayhap overturn Biden's victory.

Clark drafted a letter to Republican officials in Georgia, claiming falsely that the DOJ was "investigating various irregularities" in the 2022 election. The letter urged them to convene a special legislative session to investigate these voter-fraud claims and consider "issues pertaining to the date of Presidential Electors." Clark reportedly prepared similar letters addressed to GOP legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

None of these letters was always sent out because Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney Full general Richard Donoghue refused to go forth. "There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this," Donoghue told Clark in an e-mail obtained by ABC News.

In closed-door testimony earlier the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosen said his monthlong tenure equally interim attorney full general was marked by Trump'south "persistent" efforts to have the Justice Department discredit the election results. For case, during a December 27 phone telephone call, Rosen told Trump that he needed to "understand that the DOJ can't + won't snap its fingers + alter the outcome of the ballot, doesn't work that way," according to Donoghue's notes on the phone call.

"[I] don't expect y'all to practise that," Trump reportedly answered, "just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen."

But a wholesale defection by senior DOJ staff prevented Trump from carrying out the programme. On January 3, the president met with height Justice Department officials to discuss his desire to oust Rosen in favor of Clark, who could and then advance bogus voter-fraud claims and force per unit area country officials as acting attorney full general. Trump was informed that DOJ leaders had agreed to resign en masse if he fired Rosen, and the president somewhen accustomed that the motion "would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department but too congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results," according to the New York Times. A subsequent Senate Judiciary Committee report noted that fifty-fifty White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy joined in threatening to quit if Trump followed through on plans to replace Rosen, calling the scheme a "murder-suicide pact."

Trump still had an even more than dangerous trick up his sleeve: getting his faithful vice-president, Pence, to steal the election for him when Congress convened on January half dozen to perform the routine task of confirming the Dec 14 Electoral Higher vote.

This potentially revolutionary maneuver had two prongs. Starting time, Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas filed a lawsuit contending that the Electoral Count Human activity of 1887, which governs the prophylactic-stamping of the electoral vote count, was an unconstitutional absconding of the vice-president's power to recognize and count electors even so he wanted. Gohmert's claim was rapidly rejected by the federal courts.

At the aforementioned time, Trump lobbied Pence publicly and privately to practice whatever he could in announcing electors to deny Biden the 270 balloter votes he needed to become president-elect. Peradventure the sycophant-in-chief would give Trump an outright victory, or maybe he would simply create a dispute that would throw the contest to the U.South. House, where Republicans controlled a bulk of delegations.

Peril, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's book about Trump's plans for January 6, revealed that Trump lawyer John Eastman wrote a memo laying out a pattern for how Pence could turn the routine counting of electoral votes on that day into a coup. The plot concluded with Pence either declaring that Trump had won, claiming that the election was disputed and thus had to be resolved past the U.S. Firm, or delaying Biden's certification until Republican state legislators could be mobilized to replace Biden electors with Trump electors.

Simply Pence famously refused to claim "unilateral say-so to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not," earning him the enmity of both the Boss and the January 6 mob.

Trump continued to call on Pence to "do the right thing" by asserting a power to award his own ticket victory on January 6 itself, and may have hoped the mob he incited to march on the Capitol that day might pressure the vice president to curb the special session of Congress before it completed its work.

The fallback strategy for interfering with Biden's accession to the presidency was to utilize the procedures in the Electoral Count Human activity enabling challenges in Congress to individual country certifications. Alabama congressman Mo Brooks appear in early December that he would challenge selected Biden electors.

Trump promptly thanked Brooks publicly and encouraged others to join him, particularly in the Senate since every challenge requires the support of at least one fellow member from each chamber. Mitch McConnell discouraged his troops from joining the rebellion, just soon plenty, hard-core Trump supporters similar Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and others climbed aboard the Coup Limited.

This ready the phase for the Capitol Riot.

There is growing bear witness that Trump and his associates carefully coordinated pressure on Pence and Congress to disrupt the electoral vote count, while planning the January half-dozen rally that triggered the assail on the Capitol, as the Washington Postal service reported:

They called it the "command center," a set of rooms and suites in the posh Willard hotel a block from the White House where some of President Donald Trump's virtually loyal lieutenants were working day and night with i goal in mind: overturning the results of the 2022 election.

… They sought to brand the example to Pence and ramp up pressure on him to take actions on Jan. 6 that Eastman suggested were within his powers, iii people familiar with the operation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to draw private conversations. Their activities included finding and publicizing declared evidence of fraud, urging members of land legislatures to challenge Biden's victory and calling on the Trump-supporting public to press Republican officials in key states.

For weeks, Trump called on his supporters to descend on Washington on January six to protestation Biden'south election (and back any play he could manage in Congress). On Dec 20, he tweeted, "Statistically incommunicable to have lost the 2022 Ballot…. Big protest in DC on Jan 6th. Be in that location, will be wild!"

Past December 30, multiple groups, some of them known for armed extremism, were planning to converge on D.C. in response to Trump's summons. "Stop the Steal," a rubric invented by Roger Rock in 2022 in apprehension of a Hillary Clinton victory, became the protesters' organizing slogan.

Equally a joint session of Congress was convening to confirm the Biden victory, Trump addressed the faithful gathered on the National Mall. Much of the debate over his subsequent impeachment and Senate trial revolved around exactly what he said to the demonstrators who later on broke into the Capitol and temporarily shut down the confirmation of Biden's victory. Was this the smoking gun from his address?

All of usa here today do not desire to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they're doing. And stolen by the false news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. Information technology doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved.

Or mayhap this?

We're going to walk downward to the Capitol, and nosotros're going to cheer on our dauntless senators and congressmen and women, and nosotros're probably not going to exist cheering and so much for some of them. Considering you'll never take dorsum our country with weakness. You have to show force, and y'all accept to be potent.

Equally significant from a broader perspective was Trump's language echoing the lies he told about Democrats "finding" votes during the wee hours on Ballot Night, which he would continue to employ as a rallying cry long afterward:

Our election was over at ten o'clock in the evening. We're leading Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, past hundreds of thousands of votes.

And and then late in the evening, or early on in the morn — boom — these explosions of bullshit. And all of a sudden. All of a sudden it started to happen.

Fifty-fifty after the failure of the Jan 6 insurrection, and so Biden's inauguration, cut off even the most remote possibility of an election coup, Trump claimed vindication when Republican senators saved him from being convicted and banned from belongings office again after his second impeachment. So he and his supporters devised some other manner to keep pointlessly challenging the 2022 results. In Arizona, hard-core Trump activists in the country senate ordered an ballot "audit" (a legally meaningless term) of votes in Maricopa County, which went solidly for Biden after Trump carried information technology in 2016.

This foreign practise, conducted by an unqualified consulting firm led by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, was supposed to last 60 days only went on for 5 months without producing any evidence of the kind of irregularities that might phone call Biden's Arizona win into question (indeed, the heart of the "audit," a hand recount of every ballot cast in Maricopa, increased Biden'southward lead). The idea seems to be to muddy the waters just plenty that those who already believe in a Biden "steal" can nourish their grievances right up until the side by side presidential cycle.

Though the Arizona inspect finally footing to a close in September, similar efforts take been initiated past Republican legislators in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and by Texas Governor Gregg Abbott (focusing just on four urban counties, three of them Democratic strongholds).

In that location's been a lot of media derision almost Trump's postpresidential efforts to moving ridge the bloody shirt of the stolen election. It'south like shooting fish in a barrel to presume the 45th president is just trying to stay in the news or stay relevant or give vent to his natural mood of narcissistic grievance and vengeance. However, the damage he is doing to the credibility of democratic institutions among Republican rank-and-file voters and conservative activists is not fading but is being compounded daily.

Information technology'southward entirely plausible that Trump or some authorized successor volition build on the lies he deployed and so regularly during the 2022 ballot cycle and plan a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose response to whatever happens on November v, 2024, every bit I argued in April 2021:

If y'all beginnot with the assumption that Trump'south unabridged effort to steal the ballot was cool but regard it equally an adventurous plan that wasn't executed with the necessary precision, then opposite engineering information technology to fix the cleaved parts makes sense …

And the really heady thing for Trump is knowing how easy information technology was to convince the GOP rank-and-file base that his lies were the gospel truth.

Put together shrewd vote suppressors, audacious state legislators, emboldened conservative media, a meliorate slate of lawyers, a new generation of compliant judges, and quite mayhap a Republican-controlled Congress, and the insurrection plot could finally succeed.

This post has been updated.

Trump's Long Campaign to Steal the Presidency: A Timeline