NPR’s Scott Detrow speaks with Dan Reed, director of the documentary “Stopping the Steal,” which covers Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia who wanted Donald Trump to win the 2020 election.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: Frankly, we did win this election. This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country.
You know, we won Georgia, just so you understand.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
That was then-President Trump in the months after the 2020 election. Joe Biden, of course, won it. But Trump kept insisting it was stolen. He kept putting forward conspiracy after conspiracy. It all built to January 6, 2021.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
DETROW: Nearly four years later, at Tuesday’s presidential debate, Trump was asked if he had any regrets about his actions that day.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: I had nothing to do with that other than they asked me to make a speech. I showed up for a speech.
DETROW: Trump is, of course, facing two different criminal cases and a dozen charges related to his efforts to overturn the election, though this week, a Georgia judge again narrowed some of the charges he’s facing in the state-level criminal case there. At the debate, moderator David Muir pressed Trump on the lack of clear evidence tied to his election lies.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DAVID MUIR: You know this, you and your allies. Sixty cases in front of many judges, many of them Republican…
TRUMP: No judge looked at it. They said we didn’t have standing.
MUIR: …And said there was no widespread fraud.
DETROW: Again, not true. The cases went nowhere because there was no evidence of this widespread fraud. But that didn’t stop Trump and his allies from pressuring Republican state officials to throw out the election results. In HBO’s new documentary, “Stopping The Steal,” we hear from Republican officials who wanted Trump to win but who were not willing to break the law for him. We’re joined now by the director of “Stopping The Steal,” Dan Reed. Dan, thanks for joining us.
DAN REED: Hi. Thank you.
DETROW: You’re originally from the U.K. What drew you to this story?
REED: When I came to the realization that it seemed likely that Donald Trump and his entourage had set out to overturn the results of the 2020 election, I thought, this is insane. This is like the boldest and most daring heist in political history. It’s, you know, to actually sort of try and steal the keys to the White House, that’s quite something. But I wasn’t really – although a lot had been reported on, I wasn’t really clear about exactly how this had happened.
And also, I thought, well, there are a lot of people who are saying that Trump tried to steal the election, but maybe they just have a political axe to grind. Maybe the, you know, the evidence isn’t really there. So I started to sort of dig around in it. And what I realized was that, A, no one had really put together the whole story from a sort of 10,000-foot bird’s eye point of view. And secondly, that all of the key people who I think stood in the way of this attempt to subvert democracy were Republicans.
DETROW: Yeah.
REED: And so I thought, well, why don’t I tell this story through the eyes of the Republicans who stood in Trump’s way when he tried to overturn the election results?
DETROW: I think one of the things the film does very well is lay out in a chronological way, just in a very straightforward way all of the things that Donald Trump was saying from early in the morning of election night when he comes into the White House and says, frankly, we did win this election on – at rallies, in interviews, at White House appearances. You intercut that with things that his legal team, the elite strike force as they called themselves at one point, Rudy Giuliani and others, are saying. And I have a couple questions about that.
One is that there were a lot of moments – and I was covering the campaign. I was mostly focused on the transition that was already underway. But I was, you know, I was paying close attention. There were a lot of these moments that in real time felt farcical. They felt like they could not be a serious attempt. And I think Rudy Giuliani sweating off his hair dye is a very good example of that.
And then when you know what it all led to, when you know the violence of January 6 and how close things came to toppling over, they kind of take on a different meaning. And I’m wondering, as you were going through this footage, if you thought any differently about it than you may have when you saw it in real time?
REED: I think you put your finger on something important, which is that the way the steal – if that’s what we’re going to call the attempt to overturn the election results in 2020 – the way the steal unfolded was a series of events that could be seen as quite trivial or absurd and, you know, burlesque and comical, as you just said. And I think it takes the passage of time and also the assembling of these moments into something coherent, into something that seems like a conspiracy, really, to steal the election.
It takes that to be able to feel the chilling effect of, you know, a consistent and sustained execution of a plan. You know, that’s what it was. It, you know, Giuliani and co. went from state to state through the swing states. And President Trump reached out in person to very obscure officials. You know, I think as one of the – Gabriel Sterling, one of the protagonists in the Georgia drama, says nobody should ever know who I am. Nobody would have ever known who I am, were it not for this terrible thing that happened.
And so I think, you know, what you have is a series of quite kind of small events and small skirmishes, if you like, in the election story, none of which are dramatic enough to really draw anyone’s attention or to be sort of taken seriously. But – and I think it’s not until January 6 that people go, oh, my God. Wait a minute. What’s going on? But January 6, for all its drama, was not really the most significant event in the steal.
DETROW: What was?
REED: Well, the steal was what happened – was the cumulative effect of what happened before January 6. You know, President Trump’s embrace of John Eastman, the constitutional lawyer, in the hope of convincing everyone that Mike Pence would be able to simply change the results of the election. So I think it’s that sort of – the slow, steady strangulation of the democratic process that, with the perspective we now have, seems really chilling and dangerous. But at the time, I think, you know, as you said, you were there. It seemed crazy. It seemed nuts.
DETROW: The reason I mentioned at the very top that you’re originally from the U.K. is because I think one powerful line of response to all of this over the last four years, from President Biden and from others, is what did all of this say to the rest of the world about American democracy, the attempts to overturn the election, how close they came to actually happening, the violence of January 6? Do you have any thoughts on that after finishing this project and spending so much time thinking really closely about this?
REED: America has always been, despite, you know, the ups and downs over the years and whatever political angles one might take on how American democracy has played out, America has always been that shining beacon on the hill in terms of how we practice democracy in the rest of the world. And, you know, I’m saying that as a Brit, you know. I am filled with apprehension and even perhaps a little bit of fear as I put together this story. It’s – yeah. It’s made me a little afraid. But I hope, you know, we’re heading towards a new era in American politics, and all this will go away, and it’ll be – we’ll look back, and it will be like a bad dream.
DETROW: That was Dan Reed, director of the upcoming documentary “Stopping The Steal.” It premieres on Max September 17. Thank you so much.
REED: Awesome. Thank you, Scott.
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
