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

Trump declares victory on Election Night

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 4, he concluded his remarks to his supporters by saying:

This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. 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 law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.

It seems plausible that Trump delayed his premature victory claim by a few hours because it initially appeared that he might win legitimately. An “insider” account of Trump’s Election Night activities recently published in the Washington Post aired the theory that his declaration might have been spurred by a spontaneous suggestion from an inebriated Rudy Giuliani. But the many times Trump himself predicted he would do exactly this would indicate otherwise.

Trump’s “clown show” legal team challenges the election in court

A steadily changing cast of Trump campaign 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 small number of ballots with technical errors that a local judge had allowed voters to “cure” after a statutory deadline.

There were two big opportunities for a Hail Mary from the Supreme Court, but 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 not enacted by a constitutional amendment. And on December 11, another shot at the claim that state legislatures cannot delegate their election powers was rejected by the Court on grounds that the state bringing the suit had no standing to challenge procedures in the targeted states (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).

By then, the Trump campaign’s legal effort had descended into full farce, as became obvious on November 19 when Giuliani and Powell held a wild press conference featuring outlandish conspiracy theories, including communist manipulation of voting machines. Both Attorney General William Barr and White House adviser Jared Kushner reportedly dismissed the Trump legal team’s efforts as a “clown show.”

Trump tries to enlist Republican state legislators

Arguably the most serious Trump attempt to steal the election involved pleas to Republican legislators in key states won by Biden to dispute the results before they could be certified (the step before the formal award of electoral votes). As of November 21, Trump was publicly making arguments for this extreme remedy, but as Politico observed, it was a long shot from the get-go: “Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won would need to move to overturn their state’s popular 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 court finding that legislatures have sole power to appoint electors. And legislators in those two states didn’t respond to Trump’s requests for assistance.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia certified their election returns by December 9, and on December 14, presidential electors cast their ballots to make Biden the president-elect.

Trump pressures Georgia officials to “find” 11,000 votes

Trump continued his attempt to find state politicians willing to help him reverse the election results even after passing every deadline established by Congress over more than a century to cut off presidential-election disputes.

On December 5, he called Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who had backed the certification of Biden’s 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] by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”

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

Trump urges Justice Department to declare the election “corrupt”

Trump was also working the state angle from the other direction, conspiring in particular with Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to push Republican legislatures to investigate and possibly overturn Biden’s victory.

Clark drafted a letter to Republican officials in Georgia, claiming falsely that the DOJ was “investigating various irregularities” in the 2020 election. The letter urged them to convene a special legislative session to investigate these voter-fraud claims and consider “issues pertaining to the appointment 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 ever sent out because Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue refused to go along. “There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this,” Donoghue told Clark in an email obtained by ABC News.

The @JudiciaryDems investigation into former President Trump’s attempt to enlist the DOJ in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has already revealed some frightening truths. Just yesterday, we heard seven hours of testimony from Jeffrey Rosen alone. Much more is to come. pic.twitter.com/6q55OcX4Ox — Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) August 8, 2021

In recent closed-door testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosen said his monthlong tenure as acting attorney general was marked by Trump’s “persistent” efforts to have the Justice Department discredit the election results. For instance, during a December 27 phone call, Rosen told Trump that he needed to “understand that the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way,” according to Donoghue’s notes on the call.

“[I] don’t expect you to do that,” Trump reportedly answered, “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”

Only a wholesale revolt by senior DOJ staff prevented Trump from carrying out the plan. On January 3, the president met with top Justice Department officials to discuss his desire to oust Rosen in favor of Clark, who could then advance bogus voter-fraud claims and pressure state officials as acting attorney general. Trump was informed that DOJ leaders had agreed to resign en masse if he fired Rosen, and the president eventually accepted that the move “would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department but also 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.

Trump attempts to bully Pence into rejecting Biden’s electoral votes

Trump still had an even more dangerous trick up his sleeve: getting his faithful vice-president, Pence, to steal the election for him when Congress convened on January 6 to perform the routine task of confirming the December 14 Electoral College vote.

This potentially revolutionary maneuver had two prongs. First, Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas filed a lawsuit contending that the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which governs the rubber-stamping of the electoral vote count, was an unconstitutional abrogation of the vice-president’s power to recognize and count electors however he wanted. Gohmert’s claim was quickly rejected by the federal courts.

At the same time, Trump lobbied Pence publicly and privately to do whatever he could in announcing electors to deny Biden the 270 electoral votes he needed to become president-elect. Perhaps 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.S. House, where Republicans controlled a majority of delegations.

But Pence famously refused to claim “unilateral authority 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.

BREAKING: VP Pence in letter to the US Congress:

"It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not." pic.twitter.com/cIZvfCMfnt — NBC News (@NBCNews) January 6, 2021

Trump calls on congressional allies to block confirmation of Biden’s win

The fallback strategy for interfering with Biden’s accession to the presidency was to utilize the procedures in the Electoral Count Act enabling challenges in Congress to individual state certifications. Alabama congressman Mo Brooks announced 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 member from each chamber. Mitch McConnell discouraged his troops from joining the rebellion, but soon enough, hard-core Trump supporters like Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and others climbed aboard the Insurrection Express.

This set the stage for the Capitol Riot.