‘Stopping the Steal’ honors the Republicans who helped stop Trump from stealing 2020

Dan Reed’s documentary for HBO and Max shows how some GOP officials did the right thing.

I bet you never would have guessed, this time four years ago, that William Barr would become the hero of a liberal documentary. 

That documentary is Stopping the Steal, which landed on HBO and Max on Tuesday. Directed by Dan Reed, best known for Leaving Neverland a few years ago and The Truth vs. Alex Jones earlier this year, the new film revisits the outcome of the 2020 election and especially focuses on Barr and state election officials who refused to go along with Donald Trump’s lies about the “stolen election.” 

Of course, “Stop the Steal” was the slogan of those who believed that Trump had really won and that the election was being stolen from him; the title of this documentary, Stopping the Steal, goes the opposite way in telling the story of how Trump was the one doing the stealing, and these people stopped him. 

In the last couple of years, quite a few documentaries have been made with different angles of these events, with some focused on January 6 and others on individual bad actors.

Reed’s documentary finds a compelling angle while engagingly telling the story—even if most people watching lived through these events and remember most of the details. The target audience might feel some cognitive dissonance, having to nod and agree with some of these people. 

William Barr was pretty solidly viewed as a villain by most resistance types during Trump’s presidency. A longtime conservative legal guy was the official who manipulated the Mueller Report to help Trump out and otherwise went along with what the president wanted, doing things not even Jeff Sessions would do.

However, once Trump started challenging the election results, Barr publicly turned on him, even testifying before the January 6 Committee and, memorably, laughing at the accusations made in Dinesh D’Souza’s since-retracted documentary 2,000 Mules. 

William Barr, it would appear, is the Republican hack of all Republican hacks. He would have been all over it if there were any truth to any of it. But there wasn’t any truth to any of it.

Other former Trump loyalists, including White House aides Alyssa Farrah, Marc Short, and Stephanie Grisham, are heard from. State officials, like Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling, also participate, as the Republican Arizona Attorney General came right out and declared that he would have loved to prosecute some Democrats for executing an election conspiracy—but he didn’t because it didn’t happen.

We’ve heard from most of these people before, but it’s useful to collect all this in one place and remind everyone of the brazen lawlessness of Trump’s 2020 tantrum. 

Sure, we see a lot of video footage that’s super-familiar by now, like the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, the hair dye streaking down Rudy Giuliani’s face, and more. And I’m not sure why we needed to hear from the QAnon Shaman or unrepentant Arizona election conspirator Mark Finchem.

There’s no Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger is the subject of his own documentary, The Last Republican, which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival. 

I was also reminded that the Maricopa County election official, who the nation’s worst conspiracy theorists despise, happens to be named Bill Gates. 

Stopping the Steal is available on Max now.