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One of the most damning pieces of evidence against former President Donald Trump’s administration in the aftermath of the 2020 elections was the PowerPoint presentation that detailed a coup attempt. A report found that Trump’s public statements in 2020 matched with the contents of the PowerPoint slideshow.
According to Judd Legum of Popular Information, there is a significant amount of evidence that Trump knew and supported the strategy of carrying out a coup in order to stay in power even after the 2020 elections. Trump’s public statements in the latter half of 2020 were in line with the details in the PowerPoint presentation, according to the report. Among the details was that Trump declared that all electronic votes be invalidated due to fraud.
During his Thanksgiving address to the military, Trump also claimed electronic votes were “rigged,” and only paper ballots were accurate. The twice-impeached former president continued to peddle the claim again by December, saying that the country must resort to paper ballots rather than electronic ones. The statements were in line with the strategy to pressure then-vice president Mike Pence not to recognize all the electors that went to Joe Biden.
Trump would ultimately call on Pence days before the Capitol insurrection to overturn the 2020 election results. Pence ultimately refused to do so and oversaw the certification of Biden’s election victory hours after the riots.
“It’s unclear what influence, if any, the PowerPoint had on Trump or his inner circle,” wrote Legum. “But that is not because the PowerPoint outlined a strategy that was more ‘extreme’ or ‘wild’ than the one Trump pursued. It was largely the same. Trump did not lack the will to overturn the democratic process; He lacked a way to execute the plan.”
At the same time, the former president is also facing a series of legal battles, two of which are investigations in New York regarding his businesses. This time, a report by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure found that the former president’s hotel in Washington DC operated with a lack of oversight from the General Services Administration, which manages his business’s lease of the Old Post Office Building.
A copy of the report obtained by NBC News found that the GSA did not examine “ethical conflicts and constitutional issues posed by then-President Donald Trump’s refusal to divest from the property.”
