Mark Bowden - The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It

Also by Mark Bowden

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Black Hawk Down

Killing Pablo

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The Best Game Ever

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The Finish

The Three Battles of Wanat

Hue 1968

The Last Stone

The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

THE ATTEMPTTO OVETURNELECTIAND THE PEOPLEHO STOPPED IT

MARKBOWDEN& MATTHEWTEAGUE

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright 2022 by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague

Jacket design by Matt Dorfman

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FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

First Grove Atlantic edition: January 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5995-3

eISBN 978-0-8021-5996-0

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

To the real patriots

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER3, 2020

Donald Trump really did believe he would win. His staff had assured him of it, and .

But what if he lost? A man who grounds his very identity on winning has strategies for handling loss. For years, Trump had been laying out his. If the votes did not add up to victory, there was a reason. An obvious one. Everybody could see it. He had spelled it out again and again, warning even before his shocking victory in 2016 that

Rigged by whom? Trumps promise to Drain the Swamp was a sure applause line at his rallies. The expression long predated him, of course, referring to the nefarious ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, but Trumps usage implied something more and kept enlarging. In time .

Campaigning against Hillary Clinton, he had predicted large-scale voter fraud and had decried the American electoral process as fundamentallyunfair. He forecast a sweeping crime capable of changing the nations course but was always vague about how it would actually work. Indeed, despite his claim that everybody knew it, there was no evidence of it in modern times. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that tabulated voting fraud cases nationwide going back more than thirty years, listed only widely scattered instances committed by members of both political parties, capable of influencingand even then . But the charge resonated with those who feared big government, the growing number and power of minorities, the whole modern drift of American society. Drawing on antiquated stereotypes from the era of Tammany Hall, Trump especially stressed corruption in big cities, where Democrats ruled and the population was heavy with African Americans.

They even want to try and rig the election at the polling booths, where so many cities are corrupt. And you see that, he said, campaigning in Colorado in 2016. And voter fraud is all too common. And then they criticize us for saying that. Take a look at Philadelphia take a look at Chicago, take a look at Saint Louis. Take a look at some of these cities where you see things happening that are horrendous. In his final debate with Clinton, he had refused to say whether, in the event he lost, he would even acknowledge the results. In that event, the numbers would be crooked.

Even victory did not allay this gripe. He continued to throw shade on the contest, questioning the validity of Clintons winning margin in the popular vote, eventually setting up a commission to investigate voter fraud. Asked whether Clintons certified numbers were accurate, the commission chief, Kris Kobach, said, We may never know the answer to that. Even after the probe found nothing and disbanded, Trump continued grooming his supporters to expect fraud.

Throughout his White House tenure, he used his elevated platform to spread this message. In November 2018, prior to midterms, Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, warned of wide-scale voter fraud. They offered no evidence. Trump said, Just take a look. All you have to do is go around, take a look at whats happened over the years, and youll see. There are a lot of peoplea lot of peoplemy opinion and based on proofthat try and get in illegally and actually vote illegally. So we just want to let them knowthat there No evidence of this surfaced, no one was prosecuted, and both Republican candidates ultimately won.

Still he continued impugning the voting process. The move to allow more mail voting during the pandemic gave him a new target. Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because theyre [Democrats] cheaters, he said at a coronavirus press briefing on April 7, 2020. They go and collect them. Theyre fraudulent in many cases. You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebodys living room, Pressed the next day about the thousands and thousands claim, Trump promised to provide evidence, and did not. There wasnt any. He wasnt making a case; he was sowing suspicion.

So Trump did have a strategy in case of defeat. He used fear of fraud to raise millions of dollars for his 2020 campaign, soliciting contributions on his campaign website with the words asking for donations to ensure we have the resources to protect the results and keep fighting even after Election Day.

On October 26, one week before votes would be cast, campaigning in Allentown,

In the darkness of election morning, the first drop of water fell from the lip of a urinal in an Atlanta bathroom, splashing onto a black concrete floor. Every flood arrives with a first drop.

For months, within the walls of the State Farm Arena, water had risen in a pipe that led to the bathroom in the Chick-fil-A Fan Zone on the upper level. The arenas maintenance staff had shut off the water on that level during the coronavirus pandemic, since crowds couldnt come watch the ice skating shows or listen to Harry Styles sing. But thanks to a valve not quite shut or an O-ring worn by time, water in the pipe inched upward. Sometime in early November, it topped a curved trap and began filling the basin of the urinal, a Toto Commercial model in Cotton porcelain.