Bill Stepien, who was Donald Trump's campaign manager in the 2020 elections, assured during the interrogations of the committee of the assault on the Capitol that in the weeks following the electoral appointment there were two groups of collaborators in Trump's environment: the « normal team” and the “nutty team”.
He assured that he was in the first, those who told Trump "the truth" about the electoral result and the strategy to follow. On election night, Stepien advised his boss not to go out and declare victory. As expected, the count would take longer in many states due to the high percentage of votes by mail due to the Covid-19 pandemic. He suggested that she say that it was "too soon" to know the winner.
Every analyst knew that the so-called "red mirage" would occur that night - as it did - in which the Republican candidate appeared as the leader at the beginning of the count, only to later be compensated with the count of the vote by mail, which favored the candidate. winner, Joe Biden, in the following days. And that is what happened.
But someone showed up at the White House on election night with a different idea. It was Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and former candidate for the presidency of the United States, turned legal adviser to Trump and handler of some dark jobs, such as the pressure in Ukraine to obtain compromising information from the son of his electoral rival, Joe Biden.
Giuliani wanted to speak with Trump, who was in the White House's residential rooms. He had a conversation with several advisers to the president, such as Stepien himself or Jason Miller. "He was definitely drunk," the latter told members of the committee on Giuliani's condition. When he managed to talk to Trump, Giuliani recommended that he go on the air to "declare victory" and denounce that the Democrats were "stealing" the election from them.
Miller's recommendation was the same as Stepien's: "It was too early to declare something like that, votes were still being counted," he said. "You couldn't declare victory until you had a better idea of the numbers."
Trump listened to Giuliani. He gave a speech in which he called the election a "fraud of the American public" and a "shame." "We were preparing to win the election. Frankly, we won the election », he defended.
That was the tone that Trump followed from then until today. He relied on anyone who gave coba to his claim of electoral 'theft'. Giuliani and other lawyers, such as Sidney Powell, provided evidence of fraud as extravagant as it did not exist, which Trump's own Justice Department described as baseless and which were constantly shot down by the courts. Yesterday they were analyzed by senior officials -many of them Republicans and appointed by Trump-, who confirmed that they had no basis.
Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also recommended that he not follow the "Giuliani path" in his campaign to turn the election around. "It's not the strategy I would follow if I were you," was what he told her, he assured the committee. But the president ignored him. He only listened to the one who told him that he had not lost and that he could still win.
