A small group of Republicans stopped Trump from becoming a dictator – they might not be able to do it again

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors covers an area of Arizona that includes the city of Phoenix and a swathe of rural and suburban land to the north and west.

Most of the time it concerns itself with things like animal control policy, city planning, housing and air quality. But in 2020, during a vote to certify the county’s elections, its five members found themselves on the receiving end of an attempt by president Donald Trump to steal an election.

“The pressure by the president and his many surrogates was all part of an effort to overturn the election,” says Bill Gates, a board member. “Looking back on it, it is chilling that that’s what we were in the middle of.”

His recounting of that pivotal moment in American history comes in a new documentary directed by filmmaker Dan Reed, which tells the full story of Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election. Trump’s Heist: The President Who Wouldn’t Lose hears from the Republican politicians and administrators who resisted those efforts, whom Reed calls “the thin red line”.

If they had yielded to the leader of their party, and country, the United States could have looked very different today. “These are minor cogs in the machine that suddenly become the key to throwing an election for Donald Trump,” Reed says.

“It’s told by people who voted for Trump and really wanted him to get back in. They were diehard supporters, arch-conservatives who loved his policies, and they’re the people who tell us how close Trump came to sedition,” he adds.

After covering the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a previous documentary, Reed worked backwards to uncover exactly what and who brought the mob to the gates that day. The attack on the Capitol building was not some freak occurrence, he says, but “the last, desperate move in a very, very long game” that started just after election day.

The documentary tracks in granular detail the efforts by Trump and his cronies to turn the screws on anyone who had any power over the counting or certification of votes.

It begins in Maricopa County, the largest in Arizona, which quickly became the subject of a wave of conspiracy theories about the election: Sharpie pens, hacked voting machines and dead people voting to name a few. Those claims were investigated locally and by Trump’s own justice department, both of which found no evidence to prove the claims.

But Trump and his campaign could not, and would not entertain for a second the reality that they had lost. As they continued to spread false claims about the integrity of the vote count in Arizona, Gates and others on the board faced death threats. Nonetheless, they did their duty. The documentary shows the build-up and the finale of the dramatic board hearing where the five members — four Republicans and one Democrat – certified the vote unanimously in the face of overwhelming pressure.

“It was probably the most pressure-packed night of my life,” Clint Hickman, the Republican chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, says of the evening the five-member board certified the results from Arizona.

But it did not stop there. Over and over again, the film shows that it was Trump’s own supporters, in positions of influence over the elections, who rebuffed clear attempts to overturn a fair vote.

Once the Maricopa board had certified the results, Trump turned its attention to the legislature – specifically, Russell “Rusty” Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives and former Trump surrogate.

“I do not like bullies,” Bowers says in the documentary, as he recounts a pivotal call from Trump on 22 November in which he “put the thumb” on him.

He too was sent thousands of emails containing threats to his life and his family’s safety. “I thought many times, this is my side,” Bowers says. “This is not the Democrats. They are just laughing. My side is coming after me.”

At the time Trump and his campaign were pressuring local and state officials to bend to his will, his White House was in disarray. Senior members of the Trump administration, who later denounced his effort to steal the election, speak of Trump’s worsening delusions.

William “Bill” Barr, Trump’s attorney general, who repeatedly had to answer Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen, says of the claims: “There was simply no talking sense to him. It became clear he was just listening to these lawyers on the outside of the government. They were filling his ears with this stuff.”

Trump’s campaign to overturn the Democratic win in Arizona ultimately failed, and so his attention turned to another close-run state: Georgia. Trump needed to overturn just one of these states to change the result of the election, and Georgia was his last chance. Here the campaign would become even more intense.

The state performed an audit of its results, which showed Trump still lost by around 12,000 votes out of nearly 5 million cast. Because the race was so close, it then did a recount, which gave the same result. In response, Trump set out to publicly tarnish and pressure the top election officials in the state, starting with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger.

Xural.com