The 2020 coup attempt never ended

The scheme exposed by Jack Smith is ongoing

Last week, Special Counsel Jack Smith released a 165-page brief detailing the government’s evidence against Donald Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. 

This is one of the most important criminal filings in American history — and not just because it details a plot to overthrow a past presidential election. The brief also exposes an ongoing election subversion scheme. 

That’s because, as the special counsel’s motion makes clear, the 2020 coup attempt never really ended. In the years since January 6, 2021, President Trump and his allies have doubled down on the strategies they used in 2020, all with the goal of undermining trust and disrupting the election this fall — and potentially taking another run at overturning an election result they don’t like.

There are six key aspects to the 2020 coup attempt that are either ongoing or likely to reoccur in 2024.

1. Exploiting the “blue shift” 

What Jack Smith says: In the months leading up to the 2020 election, then-President Trump was warned that the initial election results would likely favor Trump, but that Biden would receive a disproportionate number of later-counted votes, particularly absentee ballots (the so-called “blue shift”). So according to the special counsel’s motion, Trump told advisers that he would simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted. And he started to lay the groundwork, for example saying that “It would be very, very proper and very nice if a winner were declared on November 3rd instead of counting ballots for two weeks, which is totally inappropriate, and I don’t believe that that’s by our laws” (see Smith motion, page 6).

What’s happening now: One reason for the “blue shift” in some states? State laws that don’t allow election officials to start processing absentee ballots until after Election Day. Since 2020, election experts have called on states to take steps to speed up absentee ballot processing — but in two key states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republican legislators have refused to support expanded pre-processing. And Republican-controlled legislatures in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina have added other new requirements that will likely slow down results. Unfortunately, we should expect Trump to ignore these facts and once again claim victory if he is leading in the polls on Election Day — and we should be prepared to reject those claims again

2. Disrupting vote-counting

What Jack Smith says: Two days after election day 2020, the election result in Michigan was still uncertain as ballots were being counted at facilities around the state, including at the TCF Center in Detroit. A Trump campaign employee (identified by the Washington Post as Mike Roman) “tried to sow confusion” at the TCF Center and urged a colleague on the ground there to “make them riot” — a la the Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 election in Florida. And in fact, Republican-affiliated observers did begin to disrupt the counting facility, shouting “stop the count!” at officials trying to count ballots and banging on the windows of the counting room.

What’s happening now: Amidst the wave of election legislation passed since 2021, several Republican-controlled legislatures have opened the door to further disruptions at polling and vote-counting locations by, for instance, expanding access for partisan observers and making it harder for election officials to remove disruptive observers. At the same time, the RNC has launched a major effort to recruit partisan poll monitors — which they were prohibited by court order from doing from 1982 to 2019 because of the party’s track record of using monitors to intimidate voters.

3. Spreading lies about immigrant voters, absentee voting, voting machines, and majority-Black cities

What Jack Smith says: Trump and his allies had no evidence of fraud in the election — so they made it up. Among the lies they concocted:

• 36,000 non-citizens cast ballots illegally in Arizona.

• 90,000 absentee ballots were illegally “harvested” in Wisconsin. 

• Voting machines were programmed to award extra votes to Democrats.

Notably, Trump and his allies repeatedly singled out heavily Democratic cities with large Black populations — Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia — in their allegations of voting fraud.

What’s happening now: Those same narratives are being trotted out today by Trump and his allies to stoke distrust in this year’s election. Lies about immigrants and voting are proliferating in RNC lawsuits and statements from Republican officials. Trump himself said recently about immigrants: “There’s a reason why they let all these people in because they want to get them to vote. That’s the reason.” And in late September, Trump once again accused Philadelphia of election cheating.

4. Filing bogus lawsuits

What Jack Smith says: In the days after the 2020 election, Trump sidelined his campaign lawyers in favor of Rudy Giuliani (identified in the motion as co-conspirator 1), Sidney Powell (identified in the motion as co-conspirator 3) and others. This team filed multiple lawsuits in swing states raising an array of wild claims of fraud. As the motion details, the allegations of fraud multiplied wildly in the weeks after the election — from 36,000 noncitizens voting in Arizona to 250,000, for example. Trump’s response to those who tried to explain why the claims didn’t hold up? “The details don’t matter.”

What’s happening now: This year, Trump and his allies haven’t waited until after election day to deluge the courts with litigation. But just like in 2020, many of the factual claims don’t hold up. In fact, many of the suits actually just recycle the same false claims from 2020, such as “impossibly high” voter registration rates or tens of thousands of ineligible voters voting. Instead, the lawsuits seem to be intended to add legitimacy to their false claims about ineligible voters and, potentially, to tee up “zombie lawsuits” that will come back to life in challenges to results once the election is over.

5. Suggesting Congress can intervene and change the outcome

What Jack Smith says: In December 2020 and January 2021, Trump and his allies engaged in increasingly desperate efforts to get Mike Pence and members of Congress to intervene to change the outcome of the election — to make January 6 a “climactic battle” over the election outcome. They ginned up votes by fake electors, suggested that Congress should throw it back to state legislators, and pressured Mike Pence to reject Biden votes altogether. The Smith brief revealed how much of this pressure came from Trump personally. For instance, we now know the notorious January 6th tweet that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” was sent by Trump personally, sitting alone in the White House dining room (staff left him there after failing to persuade him to call for his supporters to exit the Capitol). 

What’s happening now: Congress took decisive, bipartisan action in 2022 to clarify congressional vote-counting procedures and reinforce that Congress’s role was not to exercise its own judgment in determining what the result should be. Despite this, House Speaker Mike Johnson recently suggested that he still sees a role for Congress. He declined to commit to “observing regular order in the certification process of the 2024 election,” responding only that “if we have a free, fair and safe election, we’re going to follow the Constitution.” 

6. Instigating violence

What Jack Smith says: As the special counsel’s motion details, Trump’s tweets and rally speech on January 6 were carefully calibrated to incite his followers to violence — his last-ditch effort to interrupt the confirmation of Biden’s victory in the presidential election. He repeated his lies about fraud in the 2020 election, suggested to the crowd that Mike Pence had the power to stop the election results (Pence had no such power), and urged rally supporters to “fight” and “take back” their country and march to the Capitol “to show strength” — prompting the crowd to shout “take the Capitol,” and then try to do just that. 

What’s happening now: Far from repudiating the January 6 violence, the Trump campaign now holds up the rioters as martyrs. He has repeatedly said he would “absolutely” pardon January 6th rioters — which, more than a vindication, represents a tacit promise that future political violence will be similarly protected (part of a larger pledge of “henchmen pardons”). He called the rioters “unbelievable patriots” and regularly plays a recorded chorus of a group of January 6th prisoners at his rallies. His golf club planned to host a “J6 Awards Gala” fundraiser before it was postponed in the face of criticism. Asked if the election would end in violence if he loses, Trump answered: “it depends.” 

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Four years on, some details of the 2020 coup attempt can seem farcical. Think: Rudy’s melting makeup, Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the idea that Hugo Chavez’s ghost was somehow corrupting the voting machines. But the special counsel’s motion shows just how serious Trump and his allies were about overturning the result of the election. 

And we should take the threat seriously this year, as well. 

To be clear, the guardrails against these election-subversion strategies are strong — stronger than they were in 2020. This is because of many efforts, including by the Department of Justice, to take seriously the profound threat to our democracy posed by the attempt to overturn the last presidential election. We’re collectively much better prepared for it this time around.

Still, it’s not a question of whether or not we’ll see a similar coup attempt this time around. Because that implies the last one stopped at some point, that the activities described in Smith’s briefing are all in the past. 

The coup never went anywhere.