And Trump’s 2020 campaign manager remembered — in the days and weeks following the election — joining the unofficial “truth-telling squad” tasked with informing Trump that he had, in fact, lost the 2020 election.
In fact, Brad Parscale, who had served as Trump’s campaign manager before Stepien, had told them “that President Trump planned, as early as July, that he would say he won the election even if he lost.”
“It’s an easier job to be telling the president about, you know, wild allegations,” Bill Stepien, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, said in testimony aired Thursday by the Jan. 6 House committee. “It’s a harder job to be telling him on the back end that, ‘Yeah, that wasn’t true.’
“All of this demonstrates President Trump’s personal and substantial role in the plot to overturn the election,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.). “He was intimately involved. He was the central player.”
Add to that compelling testimony the audio of Stephen Bannon — a former senior adviser for Trump who had been in touch with him before Jan. 6 — telling associates in China a few days before the election that regardless of the actual results, Trump ‘was simply going to say he had won.’
The committee also reminded viewers that later, on Jan. 5 — just one day before the deadly insurrection — Bannon asserted on his radio show: “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” And just as predicted/planned it did.
“President Trump knew the truth,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger said. “He heard what all his experts and senior staff were telling him. He knew he had lost the election, but he made the deliberate choice to ignore the courts, to ignore the Justice Department, to ignore his campaign leadership, to ignore senior advisers, and to pursue a completely unlawful effort to overturn the election.”
Kinzinger concluded: “His intent was plain: ignore the rule of law and stay in power.”