Director: Dan Reed Cast: Alyssa Farah Griffin, William Barr, Ronald Hansen MPAA: TV-MA

It’s a question that every Trump-loyalist Republican has avoided: Was the 2020 election accurate? The night before writing this review, I watched the Vice Presidential Debate where Tim Walz posed this question to JD Vance. Like clockwork, he avoided the question. It’s that continuous refusal that is what fueled the January 6th insurrection and is the central focus of the documentary Stopping the Steal.

There are Republicans interviewed in this film who are not afraid to answer the question. They knew the election was accurate based on the overwhelming evidence, including insight from those who understand election operations. They were also in the room when Trump’s lame-duck-era tantrums went off like a bomb. It seemed so baffling for those who worked for him and within the government. When a President loses their reelection, there is supposed to be a peaceful power transfer. Trump was not like those other Presidents. He was going to leave the White House kicking and screaming-or, rather, his base would do all the kicking and screaming for him. He knew how to whip them up. If he told them the election was stolen from him, then it must be so.

But as Bill Barr so bluntly stated in his testimony, the idea of their being any election interference in 2020 was “bullshit.” The many former White House staff voice similar facts as they recount the days between the election results and the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the capital to stop certification. They tell vivid stories of how Trump kept pushing a narrative amid in-person meetings and over-the-phone feuds. He needed evidence of any kind to prove that he was the winner and not Joe Biden. The most flimsy conspiracy theories for this idea were pushed out by his base, ranging from inabilities to observe election offices to absurd claims about markers being used. All of it was false. All of these claims were thrown out of courts, primarily by judges Trump himself had appointed. There was no evidence of widespread voter tampering on the level that Trump wanted. He lost.

But as the many conservatives who initially backed Trump came to understand, Trump lives in a delusional world. The many staffers interviewed would often bring up how easy it was for the President to snap and that they’d most likely agree with him on most of his ill-thought ideas and policy. But when he suggested “finding” more votes, they started to see what many of us already knew: He’s a liar who would rather destroy the system than accept one where he loses. Their many interviews start in this film with a political declaration, as if to avoid some smearing by Trump’s blind faith that all of the counter-arguments are a Democrat conspiracy. They also come with a note of shock, as though they can’t believe this leopard is eating their faces. It’s a sign fo the time: This is not the same Republican party; this is now the Trump party.

Director Dan Reed, who previously directed The Truth vs. Alex Jones, does another solid job creating a timeline while examining the more significant cultural impact through key interview subjects. Considering how many documentaries have been made about Trump’s rhetoric and January 6th, there’s a lot of ground to cover here. But Reed does well to focus mostly on Trump’s inner workings during the key events between 2020 and 2021. Much of this will come off like a review for those who have been keeping up with the current events, either as they happened or through more in-depth documentaries like Four Hours At The Capital. It’s worth watching for a few more details and providing a broader picture by those who were there when Donald Trump was at his worst. That’s reason enough to make this an essential doc in a sea of films about this topic. Among all the movies about Trump, Stopping The Steal is the one where Republicans working alongside Trump realized he was full of shit.

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