Edition · December 13, 2020
Sunday Was a Bad Day for the Big Lie Circus
A backfill look at the strongest Trump-world screwups on December 13, 2020: the election lies got more organized, the courts stayed hostile, and the paper trail kept getting uglier.
On December 13, 2020, Trump’s post-election effort stopped looking like a noisy tantrum and started looking like a coordinated operation. The day’s most damaging developments were not one dramatic courtroom loss, but the increasingly explicit evidence that Trump allies were mapping out alternative-elector tactics while the legal challenges kept collapsing. In other words: the scheme was getting more ambitious even as its legal foundation kept cratering.
Closing take
By the end of the day, the story was no longer just that Trump had lost. It was that his circle was building a mechanism to pretend he had not, and the receipts were piling up.
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Fake electors
Confidence 4/5
★★★★★Fuckup rating 5/5
Five-alarm fuckup
Internal messaging and later-released records indicate that December 13 was a key day in the evolving alternate-electors strategy, with Trump-aligned figures discussing ways to keep the scheme alive even if the courts did not rescue it. The practical effect was to move the effort from desperate chatter into something that looks a lot more like an organized plan. That matters because the whole project depended on pretending there was a legal path where none existed.
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DOJ pressure
Confidence 3/5
★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5
Serious fuckup
Records later made public show that around December 13, Trump’s orbit was still pushing federal-law-enforcement channels to help with his election reversal effort. That matters because it blurred the line between political desperation and abuse of government power. Even before the full record was public, the shape of the screwup was already clear: turn the Justice Department into an instrument for denial, and you get a constitutional mess.
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Court wall
Confidence 3/5
★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5
Serious fuckup
The legal side of Trump’s election reversal campaign kept looking hollow on December 13, as the Supreme Court and lower-court record continued to expose how thin the challenges were. The main problem was not just losing—it was losing in ways that made the underlying claims look unserious. That left Trump with fewer legal exits and more incentive to reach for extra-legal ones.
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