The Daily Fuckup

By Dec. 13, 2020, the Trump-aligned effort to overturn the election had moved into a stage that was harder to dismiss as mere venting and easier to recognize as a coordinated workaround. The broad claim of fraud was still the public-facing excuse, but the internal record was already shifting toward something more operational: alternate electors, backup certifications, and plans designed to keep the scheme alive even if courts refused to rescue it. That date has become important because it shows the strategy hardening in real time, not as an abstract legal theory but as a practical response to defeat. In the days after the vote, the campaign and its allies had tried a range of challenges, but by this point the evidence suggests they were also preparing for failure. The point was no longer simply to argue that the election was unfair; it was to create a shadow process that could be presented as if it had equal standing with the real one.

Kenneth Chesebro’s Dec. 13 email, later referenced in prosecution materials, is one of the clearest markers of that shift. The message did not read like a narrow contingency plan that would only matter if litigation produced a victory. Instead, it pointed toward a strategy for keeping alternate electors in play regardless of whether the courts ever validated Trump’s claims. That distinction matters. A genuine legal fallback is tied to actual outcomes and grounded in procedures that already exist, while a fake-elector strategy depends on manufacturing the appearance of legitimacy after the fact. In other words, the operation was not merely waiting for judges to decide; it was building a second track that could be used to confuse, pressure, or substitute for the certified result. That is why the paper trail from this period has taken on such weight in later investigations. It is one thing to shout about fraud in public. It is another to leave behind written instructions showing how to keep the machinery moving even when the underlying premise has collapsed.

The logic of the alternate-electors scheme was always tied to the larger Trump-world effort to reject or muddy the certified outcome. If the campaign had been acting like an ordinary losing side testing its legal rights, the process would have stayed connected to recounts, lawsuits, and official certifications. Instead, the record suggests a parallel effort to manufacture a version of legitimacy that could be waved around in political and legal settings as though it meant something. That gave the false claim a structure. It also created a chain of custody for the lie, complete with emails, planning notes, and documents that could later be examined by prosecutors and investigators. For historians, that kind of record is valuable because it shows not just what people said in public, but what they were trying to do in private. For everyone else, it is a reminder that bad political ideas become more dangerous when they are organized, routinized, and put on paper.

The legal objections were already obvious at the time, and they only grew sharper as more details emerged. Electors are not a free-floating political accessory that campaigns can assign to themselves after losing. They are selected through state-certified processes, and the whole point of the Electoral College system is that the ballots cast by voters in each state determine which slate is legitimate. Once Trump allies began floating alternate certificates and contingency plans, the move invited the obvious accusation that they were trying to bypass the electorate by inventing a rival outcome. That criticism was not based on partisan taste; it was rooted in the basic rules of how presidential elections work. The added problem was that the public fraud narrative remained unsupported by evidence strong enough to change the result, which made the alternate-electors push look less like a lawful challenge and more like a desperate attempt to fill a vacuum with paperwork. By Dec. 13, the operation had accrued the smell of overreach, and the smell was getting stronger because the documents were starting to tell the story for themselves.

What happened on Dec. 13 was not a single dramatic collapse, but it was a major step in the collapse of plausible deniability. Trump had already lost repeatedly in court, and every new maneuver made the larger effort look less like an election dispute and more like a plan to keep defeat from counting. That mattered politically because it undermined the claim that the campaign was simply exhausting legitimate avenues before conceding the obvious. It also mattered because it set the stage for the later confrontation over Congress’s certification process, where the fake-elector idea could be used as one more prop in the broader pressure campaign. The central fact of the day is that the operation stopped being merely rhetorical and became documentable. Once the effort was reduced to a trail of emails, drafts, certificates, and contingency theories, it was no longer just about grievance or post-election theater. It was about intent, coordination, and a willingness to construct an alternate version of reality in the hope that enough people would treat it as real.