He also heeded misplaced assurances from White House aides like Jared Kushner that Trump would eventually accede to reality, people close to the senator told The Times. McConnell feared alienating a president whose help he needed in two Georgia Senate runoffs that would decide his control of the chamber. Trump was given vital room to run by key Republicans, especially the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who made an early decision to join his fellow party members in breaking from the tradition of recognizing the victor after the major television networks and The Associated Press called the race. Trump was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far John McCain’s record as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who would become one of Trump’s most controversial and unbridled defenders. The theory found amplification the day before the election on the podcast of Trump’s former political strategist, Stephen Bannon, who invited two proponents of the theory onto his show to speak about it: Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who had previously been banned from Fox News for lies about Sen. In late October, an obscure conservative website, The American Report, was pushing stories about a supercomputer called The Hammer that it said was running software called Scorecard to steal votes from Trump. The Dominion conspiracy theory taking root among the president and many of his supporters had been weeks in the making. Voting-machine conspiracy theories became intertwined with a supercomputer story pushed in conservative media 12 the day when Trump’s effort to reverse his loss in the courts became an all-out, extralegal campaign to disenfranchise millions of voters based on the false notion of pervasive fraud. Ultimately, Trump decided to give Giuliani leadership of the entire legal strategy, making Nov. Here are some key takeaways: As some lawyers on Trump’s team pulled back, others were ready to press ahead with suits skating the lines of legal ethics and reasonĪt an Oval Office meeting that day, the election lawyers squared off against the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, over Giuliani’s embrace of questionable legal tactics and conspiracy theories like one that Dominion voting machines had transformed Trump votes into Biden votes. Interviews with central players, along with documents, videos and previously unreported emails, tell the story of a campaign that was more coordinated than previously understood, even as it strayed farther from reality with each passing day. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.įor 77 days between the election and the inauguration, President Donald Trump attempted to subvert American democracy with a lie about election fraud that he had been grooming for years.Ī New York Times examination of the events that unfolded after the election shows how the president - enabled by Republican leaders, advised by conspiracy-minded lawyers and bankrolled by a new class of Trump-era donors - waged an extralegal campaign that convinced tens of millions of Americans the election had been stolen and made the deadly Jan.
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