Trump Saw 2020 Election Results as an Obstacle, Not an Outcome

A court filing offers insight into his thinking and makes it hard to see him accepting another loss.

Three days before the 2020 election, one of former President Donald Trump’s closest advisers told a private gathering of his supporters that, no matter what happened on Election Day, the president was going to say he had won.

“He’s going to declare victory,” said the adviser, according to a new court filing by the special counsel investigating Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after that election.

“That doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s the winner,” said the adviser, whose name is redacted but who appears from other details to be Stephen Bannon.

The filing was a step in the effort by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to prove that Trump is not immune from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

But, one month before Trump is on the ballot again, it also offered new details that paint a chilling picture of the way the former president and current candidate seems to think about elections: as an exercise in which the vote total is entirely beside the point. In his world, adverse election results were an obstacle, not an outcome.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump told family members at one point, according to the filing. “You still have to fight like hell.”

Coming at a time when his allies, including his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, have tried to downplay Trump’s efforts to hold onto power four years ago, the filing offers a glimpse of Trump’s thinking that makes it difficult to imagine him accepting a loss in November.

“Trump is in to the end,” Bannon said shortly after the 2020 election.

A strategy of confusion

The filing sheds new light on the way Trump and his advisers viewed the number of votes he had won as little more than a trifling detail. Trump and his allies have argued that he contested the results in any way he could because he genuinely believed they were fraudulent.

The filing lays out the ways Trump dismissed the real numbers. He sidelined advisers who knew that results, as they were, meant he had not won, and relied instead on the counsel of allies like Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor. He ignored or even threatened swing state Republicans who presented him with inconvenient truths, as when a person who appears to be Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, said the state had found evidence that only two voters who had died had cast ballots — not thousands, as Trump had claimed.

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” Trump said, according to the filing. “That’s a criminal, you know, that’s a criminal offense.”

As they looked for ways to gum up the electoral certification process at any level, Trump and his allies knew confusion and conjecture were their most important tools.

“We don’t have the evidence,” a person who appears to be Giuliani told state legislators in Arizona in early December, “but we have lots of theories.”

They also seemed to understand that just the existence of lawsuits would help legitimize Trump’s claims in the minds of the public. That might be why Trump showed so little concern when he was told by an adviser that Giuliani’s false claims of fraud could not be proved in court.

“The details don’t matter,” Trump said.

Worries about this November

It was only two days ago that Vance sought to dismiss Trump’s efforts to overturn the election as a thing of the past. When Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota asked him on the debate stage this week if the election had been stolen, Vance said breezily that he was “focused on the future.”

Trump repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” earlier today.

And, reading Smith’s court filing now, there are striking parallels between Trump and his allies’ actions in 2020 and certain steps they are taking today — and it’s something Democrats and allies of Vice President Kamala Harris are warning about as they make the case that Trump is a danger to democracy.

“We’re setting ourselves up for another bad election certification process,” said former Representative Dave Trott of Michigan, a Republican who has endorsed Harris.

The Republican National Committee has started a flurry of lawsuits, some of which are premised on false claims, that voting rights experts say appear to be part of preparations to contest the results of the 2024 election.

“Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy,” Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that monitors elections, told my colleagues last week.

At his rallies and in social media posts, Trump has also been promoting false claims that immigrants who are not citizens will vote during the election, echoing the way his false claims about mail ballot fraud before the 2020 election sowed the seeds of distrust in those results.

“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English,” he said falsely during his debate with Harris last month.

And, with election results expected to take days in key states, the country could face the same kind of lag in vote-counting that Trump moved to exploit last time by declaring victory right away.

In 2020, Bannon had told the group of supporters that they knew more Republicans would vote on Election Day, while more Democrats would vote by mail, so the ballots counted in the days after Election Day were more likely to break for Joe Biden.

“They’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said, “that’s our strategy.”

Send us your questions about how we cover the election

In an effort to bring clarity and transparency to our journalism, over the next few weeks we will be answering some of your questions about our election coverage.

How are we investigating the candidates’ positions on the issues and the sources of their campaign funding? How does our polling operation work? How do we determine which House and Senate races to focus on? What additional resources are we putting into covering swing states? How will The Times follow vote counts? How will we call races on election night?

We’re sure you’ll come up with even better questions. Editors and reporters from teams across the newsroom — including Politics, Elections Analytics and Washington — will address as many questions as they can in the weeks leading up to the election.

Send in your questions here.