Steve on TV: ‘Stopping the Steal’ is the Georgia election documentary that shouldn’t exist

Steve Murray’s monthly musings on TV in Atlanta and beyond.

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It was mid-morning, but the woman’s voice at the end of the line already sounded weary. Well, the better word might be battered. “Brad Raffensperger’s office,” she said.

This must have been November or December of 2020. You remember — those panicky, masked-up days of COVID-19. The Republican secretary of state, after the second or third recount demanded by the political party he belonged to, had certified that Georgia’s voters elected Joe Biden. 

The woman on the phone hesitated when I asked her to pass along a message to her boss. I wanted to thank him for acting ethically, performing the nonpartisan job he was elected to do. She stammered, surprised as hell, then said she’d be glad to pass my words along. 

I came to realize later that she was among many government workers targeted with verbal abuse and worse — doxed, hounded at their homes, lobbed with death threats and promises of rape — in the weeks and months following the 2020 presidential election, when Donald Trump did not get his way. 

If you’ve read this far, you know how I’m voting in this election. 

Directed by Dan Reed (of the Michael Jackson documentary Leaving Neverland) Max’s Stopping the Steal recounts that time in depth, in the words of many who survived it. Speakers include Raffensberger; Gabriel Sterling, who was Georgia’s election operations manager; Bjay Pak, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Georgia’s Northern District (who confirmed “there was no irregularity” in the voting process); and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Patricia Murphy.

If we lived in a saner nation, I wouldn’t be recommending Steal, a documentary I know you don’t want to watch. I didn’t want to watch it, either — it shouldn’t have to exist. But here we are, four years later, approaching an election that, without hyperbole, could be the most consequential in the nation’s history. The framers of the U.S. Constitution anticipated a lot of challenges and dangers in our brief 248 years. But they couldn’t imagine the internet, social media, Fox News or a society of citizens strangely unable to separate truth from lies. 

Creating a dual sense of déjà vu and impending dread, Steal takes us back to 2 a.m. after election night 2020, when Donald Trump kicked off the cavalcade of fibs and misinformation the documentary covers. Stepping in front of reporters and cameras in the White House press room, he claims to have won a second term. 

He didn’t. “Obviously, I wanted Trump to win — I supported Trump,” says Bill Barr, who served as the then-president’s attorney general. But when Trump started “spewing out all these allegations” of voter fraud, he began searching for an escape route from the Department of Justice. 

So did Stephanie Grisham, White House press secretary, who was there all through the post-election weeks when other staffers created an echo chamber for her boss, assuring him “it was stolen, sir.” She held on in her job until the barbarities of that “day of love” (as Trump has renamed the murderous insurrection of January 6) prompted her to quit on the spot. 

In addition to the Georgia speakers, Steal benefits from talking heads inside the White House inner circle, like Grisham, and including chief of staff Marc Short; Alyssa Farah Griffin, director of strategic communications and presidential assistant; and Barr. These folks had ringside seats as the clown car pulled up on Pennsylvania Avenue, disgorging lawyers Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and, of course, Rudy Giuliani, leaking rivers of Grecian Formula down his temples.

“That’s when shit really hit the fan,” says Griffin, inelegantly if accurately. 

As Trump’s insane clown posse swarmed into D.C., “It was almost like this barroom scene from Star Wars — you know, of people hanging around the Oval Office.” That’s Bill Barr’s description. In his ongoing, retroactive attempt to salvage his reputation, Barr probably doesn’t want viewers to remember how he served as Trump’s yes man, publicly misinterpreting the Mueller Report’s conclusions in his boss’ favor. Still, he gives the documentary some of its best lines. 

Reed’s film focuses first on the battle over reality in Maricopa County, Arizona. The standout witness here is Rusty Bowers, speaker of the house of Arizona’s state Legislature, and, at the time, a Trump supporter. He recalls direct pressure from the president, asking him to invoke an old state law that would enable Bowers to throw out Biden’s electors and replace them with Trump’s. “The dude is just straight up asking me to throw the election,” says a still-amazed Bowers. His refusal resulted in strangers menacing him in his own front yard. 

Then, the insanity swarms across the country to Georgia. We get Sean Hannity’s lies about swapped suitcases full of ballots at the Fulton County polls and Giuliani’s lies about Dominion-made voting machines and election workers (lies that cost him $148 million defamation payment to Ruby Freeman and daughter Shaye Moss). All the lies are here. But why are we?

A prime emotional moment in the doc: Sterling’s impassioned press conferences, held at the foot of the state Capitol’s staircase, when death threats against election workers were getting fevered. “Stop inspiring people to commit acts of political violence,” he pleads. “Someone’s gonna get hurt. Someone’s gonna get shot. Someone’s gonna get killed.” But Trump and his crew didn’t listen, even as the Georgia result was counted three different times. 

“Some people didn’t have the political guts just to tell President Trump that it came up short,” Raffensperger says. Again, we hear that infamous phone call of Trump wheedling the secretary to cough up some nonexistent 11,000 votes to keep himself in office. The tape proves that the former president intended to steal the election, while accusing the other party of that actual crime — the daily exercise of projection that has characterized the GOP since Trump swallowed it whole.  

There’s a reason we love Halloween. The atavistic part of ourselves, even the most rational among us, wants to believe in monsters and magic and bogeymen and deep, dark conspiracies. In earlier decades, certainly in the 20th century, most of us partied and handed out Halloween candy. Then we woke up on November 1 and remembered that all that nonsense was, well, nonsense. This year, after we set aside our yearly masks, I’m feeling there’s still a reason to be truly afraid. 

A better name for Stopping the Steal might be Stopping the Lies. But the time for that title seems to have come and gone a long time ago as we continue to live in the land of untruths. 

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming columns here.