How Trump consolidated control of his party and right-wing media in a “cloud of confusion.”

CNN
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An explosive legal file from special counsel Jack Smith unsealed on Wednesday contains new evidence in the election subversion case against Donald Trump.

The filing highlights Trump’s false voter schemes and details the former president’s attempts to sow confusion after the election. Trump and his “private agents attempted to create chaos rather than provide clarity at polling stations where states continued to tabulate their votes,” the filing said. It also alleges that Trump said “the details don’t matter” when he was warned that false claims of election fraud would not stand up to judicial scrutiny.

The following is adapted from the newly expanded paperback edition of “Network of Lies” my book about the 2020 election and the chaotic aftermath.

After the 2020 election defeat, Trump managed to reassert control of the party and its media wing by exploiting what lawyer Kenneth Chesebro called the “cloud of confusion.”

Chesebro has kept a relatively low profile for most of his career, but in 2020 he was one of the architects of the so-called fake voter plot. According to Jack Smith’s original conspiracy indictment against Trump, the idea was to trick Republican voters into submitting fake Electoral College certifications claiming that the loser of the election was actually the winner. The indictment called it “a corrupt plan to undermine the functioning of the federal government by preventing the votes of Biden voters from being counted and certified.”

And Chesebro knew exactly what he was doing, according to one of his own emails. On November 8, 2020, the same day Biden was elected president, Chesebro emailed fellow lawyer Jim Troupis and volunteered to help Trump challenge the results in his native Wisconsin. Chesebro claimed that Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature could take advantage of the Democratic governor and declare Trump the winner of the state’s electoral votes. Imagining “systemic abuses” and alternative electoral lists, he wrote that “at least with such a cloud of confusion, no votes from WI (and perhaps MI and PA too) should be counted, perhaps enough to send the election to the House of Representatives. “ .”

The goal was to create chaos and profit from the resulting disorder. The hope — the prayer — was that Vice President Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role overseeing the certification, would accept the fake certificates and overturn Biden’s victory; or that the “cloud of confusion” would cast such a shadow that Congress would instead vote for the president through a state delegation, thus turning the election in Trump’s favor, since 26 states were controlled by the Republican Party at that point.

Chesebro’s memos about so-called “alternative voters” were influential within Trumpworld in the weeks leading up to January 6th. But the public knew almost nothing about the plan when it took place.

In 2022, on January 6, the House committee used its legal authority to obtain some of the memos, and its final report said Chesebro was “central to the creation of the plan.” But Chesebro’s Nov. 8 email seeking to sow confusion didn’t see the light of day until a group of Democrats in Wisconsin sued Chesebro, Troupis and pro-choice groups. As part of a settlement agreement, more than 1,400 pages of documents related to the fraud voter conspiracy were released in March 2024. In other words, the public was still learning important details about the extent of the MAGA coup attempt more than three years later. The legal system slowly but surely gained accountability.

“Cloud of Confusion” was the perfect, succinct summary of the right’s strategy. Candidates like Trump, lawyers like Chesebro, TV stars like Sean Hannity, and streaming propagandists like Tucker Carlson created so much chaos and confusion that voters and viewers could no longer tell what was true. Every time Trump wanted to refute a damaging story about him, he called it a “hoax.” Every time Hannity wanted to protect Trump from real but critical reporting, he called the news “fake.”

As I reconstructed the 2020 election conspiracy case, I concluded that the “cloud of confusion” is an important part of Trump’s 2024 re-election toolbox. The results were evident in the right-wing media’s blaming of the border crisis; in polls that showed many voters disagreed with Trump repealing Roe v. Wade ruling; and in Republican denial of the January 6 attack. Every story about Trump has been obscured by the shadow of the cloud. Did doctors kill newborns? Did immigrants in Ohio eat cats and dogs? Did Kamala Harris Employees Lie About Her Time at McDonalds? Maybe, maybe not, how can anyone know for sure? Sowing confusion seemed to impair any ability to think critically.

The cloud hovered over the White House throughout the four years of Trump’s presidency. John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, recognized this back in February 2017, when he warned that “Trump is employing a strategy used by autocrats that aims to completely disorient public perception.” Trump, he warned, ” “Trying to create a hall of mirrors in which even our most basic sensory perceptions are shrouded in confusion.” He is mimicking Vladimir Putin’s successful strategy.”

The “cloud of confusion” clearly affected some of the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Take “Rally Runner,” a Missouri man, Daniel Donnelly Jr., who earned his nickname by running around Busch Stadium during St. Louis Cardinals games wearing red clothing and paint. His social media footprint showed how radicalized he was — and how he trusted both Trump and Carlson more than reliable news sources. “This is so true!” he wrote on Facebook while sharing a Carlson clip. “Tucker did it again!” he wrote on another Fox video. On January 6, he used a stolen police shield to help the mob get past the police. On the evening of the attack, he confessed to the crime in a Facebook video.

But in December 2021, Carlson turned on his big fan by showing a video of Donnelly with red face paint and expressing doubt that Donnelly was really a Trump fan. Carlson greeted a guest who said Donnelly was “clearly a police officer” and an “agent provocateur.” This deeply offended Donnelly, who told NBC he believed Carlson was “a responsible reporter focused on stopping ‘fake news'” — until Carlson’s show lied about him.

Donnelly learned Carlson’s true colors the hard way. In March 2024, he pleaded guilty to a felony and a misdemeanor for his role in the attack. This resolved another Carlson lie. But by then the former Fox presenter had already moved on. This is how the “Cloud of Confusion” worked. Cheseboro was even more right than he knew.