New HBO Series Looks Back at Stop the Steal Campaign by Trump and His Acolytes
As Americans prepare to go to the polls, a new HBO documentary is a cautionary tale warning against Donald Trump’s treachery and dishonesty in his efforts to hold and seize power.
In the 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World U.S. journalist John Reed chronicled the Russian Revolution; now British director Dan Reed has definitively documented Trump’s deliberate pressure campaign of deceit and disinformation to undermine the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Stopping the Steal.
In his non-fiction film, Reed presents a slew of mostly (former or current) Republican behind-the-scenes eyewitnesses to history plus features a rogues’ gallery of MAGA acolytes. Many of these talking heads are familiar to avid consumers of cable and broadcast news and talk shows, podcasts, Internet reportage and rumor-mongering, plus the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack’s hearings. However, in addition to unearthing and adding lesser-known players in 2020’s high stakes electoral debacle, interspersed with gripping footage of the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building, Reed has assembled them all under one umbrella in a well-told narrative that is comprehensive and cogent.
Stopping the Steal has insider information to intrigue those who have paid close attention to the so-called “Stop the Steal” delirium Trump drummed up—as Greg Jacob, legal counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, insists “people were sold an idea that was untrue.” (The film cuts from Jacob to the mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” at the Capitol.) But “newbies” and viewers who are not news junkies per se will also find it easy to follow this documentary that is only 90 minutes long and is a sort of primer on how to attempt to steal a U.S. election.
In meticulously making its case, Stopping the Steal features numerous interviews, some of which appear to be original to the film and others that are likely derived from news clips and archival material, such as sweaty Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye dripping down his face. Many of the interviewees are—or were, at the time—Republicans who, as former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr puts it, were “before the election for Donald Trump.” Alyssa Farah Griffin, whose Trump administration job titles included White House Director of Strategic Communications, says she was “emotionally invested in him winning” a second term in office. Stephanie Grisham, whose Trump regime positions included being Chief of Staff and Press Secretary for First Lady Melania, states that she felt like she was one of the Trump family.
Grisham was also the White House Press Secretary who, for nine months rather infamously, never held any media briefings but is, like the film’s other GOP (then and/or now) interviewees, speaking out in the doc. In the White House, early the next morning after the November 3, 2020, election, Trump appears on live TV at 2:21 a.m. and defiantly purported that “this is a fraud” and “frankly, we did win,” which Attotney General Bill Barr calls “very dangerous.” Barr contends that, after looking into the allegations, he did not see evidence of widespread fraud. Jacob counsels Pence that the latter did “not want to make allegations he can’t support.”
On the local level, officials in two hotly contested states, Arizona and Georgia, likewise expressed hesitation over Trump’s outlandish claims of victory and vote rigging. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich says he “had every motive” to award the Grand Canyon State’s electoral votes to Trump. “I’d love nothing more,” the Republican admits, but adds: “The info’s not there. They [MAGA voters] believed it because they kept hearing it,” which Brnovich calls “confirmation bias.”
Later, Clint Hickman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors echoes his Arizona GOP colleague’s words, asserting as he joins the Board’s unanimous vote to certify the results of the presidential election: “Let me be clear, there’s no evidence [Arizona’s votes were stolen]. I’m not going to violate the law and deviate from my moral compass.”
On the other end of the spectrum, what Jenna Ellis dubs “an elite strike force team” of mega-MAGA true believers assembles to aggressively argue and agitate in favor of Trump’s re-election, including Giuliani, Ellis and Sidney Powell, who threatens to “release the Kraken” (“a gigantic sea monster from Scandinavian folklore that rises up from the ocean to devour its enemies,” see: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55090145).
Their wild, unsubstantiated claims include allegations of massive voting by dead people and non-citizens, plus Internet hocus pocus to switch Trump votes to Biden ballots by Dominion Voting Systems. The unhinged Powell also wildly alleges that the presidential election was bedeviled by “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and probably China.” And so on.
As part of this pressure campaign Trump himself enters the fray, with his infamous phone call (that was recorded) to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, petulantly demanding: “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes,” in order to carry the Peach State.
The coerciveness and threat level becomes so intense that Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, delivers an impassioned, televised plea to Trump and the nation: “Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia…You have the rights to go through the courts. What you don’t have the ability to do—and you need to step up and say this—is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed, and it’s not right. It’s not right.” But, of course, Sterling subsequently received death threats for his entreaty for peace.
After Giuliani and his associates refuse repeated requests to provide the proof of their allegations about fraudulent elections, lifelong Republican Rusty Bowers, the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, refuses to call a special session to appoint an alternate slate of electors. Bowers and his family receive “the most vile” death threats. MAGA supporters show up at his home, denouncing Bowers as a “pedophile,” and onscreen the beleaguered, aging GOP stalwart laments: “My side is coming after me.”
(Although I don’t recall this being in Stopping the Steal per se, subjected to repeated death threats, in early 2024 Hickman did not seek re-election to the Board of Supervisors. And in August 2023 an Iowa man was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars for threatening both Hickman and Brnovich.)
Reed expertly sets up the events leading to the madness of January 6. Throughout the documentary, Jacob Chansley is seen at various demonstrations—he is easy to identify because of his zany outfit as the demented so-called “Q-Anon shaman,” with horned, furry headgear, warpaint on his face, tattooed, bare-chested and spewing slogans such as “We’re bringing down the New World Order.” Sharp-eyed viewers will also discern figures such as Alex “Crisis Actor” Jones creeping around in the background.
Enter attorney and academic John Eastman arguing against all historic precedence that the vice president does not have to certify the Electoral College votes at the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021. This ahistorical interpretation of the Constitution set Trump on what VP Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short calls a “collision course” with the President. On January 5, 2021, the White House releases a statement that the veep agrees with Trump’s assertions about the vice president’s role vis-à-vis certifying the Electoral College vote, which Short blasts as an “outright lie.”
Trump may have downplayed it in his recent debate with Kamala Harris, but the ex-prez’s role in riling up the MAGA faithful to invade the Capitol with his inciting speech at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, is clearly put into context in Stopping the Steal. The January 6 invasion of the Capitol, which Trump obviously spurred on, aimed at disrupting the Electoral College tally and certification, proved to be the final straw for many of the documentary’s administration faithful—until then, that is. Stephanie Grisham erupts: “You guys are fucking crazy…You fucker, I knew you would not march down there [to the Capitol, as Trump lies to his chumps in his speech]. I was pissed, disgusted. I resigned then,” as Griffin and Barr already had.
Chillingly, Grisham warns 2024 America that “January 6 is the trailer to the movie.” With Trump, “There’s always more, take it as far as it will go.” Griffin adds: “We’re in a very dangerous place. Of course, he will not accept it if he loses in 2024,” Trump will claim the election is “rigged” and will not abide by an electoral loss “peacefully.” Greg Jacob looks into the camera and insists “character matters,” that putting somebody into office who will not follow the Constitution and laws “could be the end of the Republic.”
Although it does show the mug shots of Trump, Giuliani, Powell and Ellis vis-à-vis the Georgia election interference case, Stopping the Steal should have recapped the indictments, convictions, lawsuits, etc., against the culprits who claimed that Dominion fixed the electoral results, and so much more. For instance: FOX “News” reached a $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over the lies spread by Tucker Carlson—who was subsequently fired—and Sean Hannity, et al.
Jacob Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison for his role in the January 6 attack. Alex Jones lost a $965 million judgment to the Sandy Hook families he defamed. And so on. But then again, citing all of these charges might have made the hour-and-a-half documentary way too long.
An expert documentarian, Dan Reed in Stopping the Steal has crafted a compelling indictment of Trump and a red alert for the survival of the imperiled U.S. constitutional system. Reed is a heavy hitter in the non-fiction realm who also helmed the Michael Jackson Leaving Neverland film, as well as: 2024’s The Truth vs. Alex Jones, 2021’s In the Shadow of 9/11, 2016’s Three Days of Terror: The Charlie Hebdo Attacks and many more.
Stopping the Steal joins the documentaries A Storm Foretold–Roger Stone and Die by Danish director Christoffer Guldbrandsen; Against All Enemies by Sebastian Junger and Charlie Sadoff; and Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen by investigative reporter Greg Palast; as well as the docuplay Fatherland by Stephen Sachs, in the growing canon of works chronicling January 6’s attempted insurrection and the rise of America’s contemporary far right.
Stopping the Steal reveals, among many other things, that Trump is a master of stochastic violence, which is, as Gabriel Sterling put it, “inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.” From January 6 to the recent big lies about “illegal migrants” eating pets in Springfield, which triggered bomb threats at that Ohio town, Trump repeatedly spews racist bile that incites MAGA adherents to threaten and/or execute violence against Trump’s targets. But given two assassination attempts in as many months, the chickens may be coming home to roost, and the consequences of his stochastic violence may be bouncing back on the inciter-in-chief, for those who live by the sword die by the sword—or AK-47. Call it “the hate that hate produced.”
On January 6, 2021, during the House Select Committee hearings, Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to Trump’s then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified that, when the Secret Service warned Trump before his speech at the January 6, 2021, Ellipse rally that demonstrators outside the security magnetometers were armed, Trump replied: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here, let the people in and take the mags away.”
Given that Trump’s hate speech and dubious actions may now be boomeranging, from now on The Donald may have second thoughts about removing metal detectors when he appears in public…
Stopping the Steal debuted September 17, 2024, on HBO and will be available to stream on Max.
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About the Author
Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian and critic who also reviews culture, foreign affairs and current events.
Ed can be reached at edrampel@gte.net.
