By now, 6 January 2021 has so thoroughly saturated the American political consciousness – a single date conjuring up images of the once unthinkable, mentioned every day in news about criminal court cases, the future of democracy and Donald Trump’s ongoing presidential campaign – that you could argue we are used to it. Election denialism has become a feature, not a bug, of a major political party for nearly four years. The fact that Trump, when given the opportunity by ABC moderators to distance himself from efforts to discredit the 2020 election during this month’s presidential debate, still refused to acknowledge Joe Biden’s legitimate victory is no longer surprising, though we are also inured to shock.
But a new HBO documentary argues, through forensic chronological detail and, perhaps ironically, the testimony of Republican election officials and former members of Trump’s administration, for remembering just how beyond the pale attempts to subvert the 2020 election were. As recounted in Stopping the Steal, a new film from the Leaving Neverland director, Dan Reed, the period between election night 2020 and 6 January 2021 was a series of genuinely shocking, potentially devastating opportunities for democratic disaster that often came down to clashes between obscure, local Republican officials and the president of the United States. January 6, in fact, “isn’t the scary bit”, Reed said. “The really scary bit is all the machinations that happened before. Because had they succeeded, the knock-on effect would have been to just gum up the system.
