How Trump consolidated control over his party and right-wing media in a ‘cloud of confusion’

A bombshell legal filing from special counsel Jack Smith unsealed Wednesday contains new evidence in the election subversion case against Donald Trump.

The filing emphasizes Trump’s fake electors plot and describes the former president’s attempts to sow confusion in the aftermath of the election. Trump and his “private operatives sought to create chaos, rather than seek clarity, at polling places where states were continuing to tabulate votes,” the filing says. It also asserts that Trump said “the details don’t matter” when he was warned that false claims about voter fraud wouldn’t survive courtroom scrutiny.

The following is adapted from the newly expanded paperback edition of “Network of Lies,” my book about the 2020 election and the chaotic aftermath.

After losing the election in 2020, Trump was able to reconsolidate control over the party, and its media wing, by exploiting what attorney Kenneth Chesebro called the “cloud of confusion.”

Chesebro kept a relatively low profile for most of his career, but in 2020 he was one of the architects of the so-called fake electors plot. The idea, according to Jack Smith’s original conspiracy indictment of Trump, was to have Republican electors submit bogus Electoral College certificates claiming that the loser of the election was actually the winner. The indictment called it “a corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified.”

And Chesebro, according to one of his own emails, knew exactly what he was doing. On November 8, 2020, the same day Biden became president-elect, Chesebro emailed a fellow attorney, Jim Troupis, and volunteered to help Trump challenge the results in his native Wisconsin. Chesebro asserted that Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature could bigfoot the Democratic governor and declare Trump to be the winner of the state’s electoral votes. He imagined “systemic abuses” and alternative slates of electors and wrote that “at minimum, with such a cloud of confusion, no votes from WI (and perhaps also MI and PA) should be counted, perhaps enough to throw the election to the House.”

The goal was to create chaos and benefit from the ensuing disorder. The hope—the prayer—was that VP Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role overseeing the certification, would accept the bogus certificates and overturn Biden’s victory; or that the “cloud of confusion” would cast such a shadow that Congress would vote for president by state delegation instead, thereby tipping the election to Trump, since twenty-six states were GOP-controlled at the time.

Chesebro’s memos about so-called “alternate electors” were influential inside Trumpworld in the weeks leading up to January 6. But the public knew almost nothing about the scheme as it was happening.

In 2022 the House’s January 6 committee used its legal powers to obtain some of the memos, and its final report said Chesebro was “central to the creation of the plan.” But Chesebro’s November 8 email about sowing confusion did not see the light of day until a group of Democrats in Wisconsin sued Chesebro, Troupis, and the election posers. As part of a settlement deal, more than fourteen hundred pages of documents relating to the fake electors plot were released in March 2024. In other words, the public was still learning key details about the extent of the MAGA coup attempt more than three years after it occurred. The legal system was slowly but surely achieving accountability.

“Cloud of confusion” was the perfect, succinct summary of the right’s strategy. Candidates like Trump, attorneys like Chesebro, TV stars like Sean Hannity, and streaming propagandist like Tucker Carlson sowed so much chaos and confusion that voters and viewers couldn’t tell what was true anymore. Every time Trump wanted to disarm a damaging story about him, he called it a “hoax.” Every time Hannity wanted to defend Trump from real but critical news coverage, he called the news “fake.”

As I reconstructed the 2020 election conspiracy case, I came to view the “cloud of confusion” as a key part of Trump’s 2024 re-election toolkit. The results were evident in the right-wing media’s blame-shifting about the border crisis; in polls showing that many voters didn’t connect Trump to the repeal of Roe v. Wade; and in the GOP’s denialism about the January 6 attack. Every story about Trump was covered by the shadow of the cloud. Were doctors killing newborn babies? Were immigrants in Ohio eating cats and dogs? Were Kamala Harris aides lying about her stint working at McDonalds? Maybe, maybe not, how can anyone know for sure? The sowing of confusion seemed to shut down any and all critical thinking skills.

The cloud hovered over the White House during the four years of Trump’s presidency. Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta identified it early on, in February 2017, when he warned that “Trump is deploying a strategy, used by autocrats, designed to completely disorient public perception.” Trump, he warned, “is attempting to build a hall of mirrors where even our most basic sensory perceptions are shrouded in confusion. He is emulating the successful strategy of Vladimir Putin.”

The “cloud of confusion” clearly affected some of the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Take “Rally Runner,” a Missouri man, Daniel Donnelly Jr., who earned his nickname by running around Busch Stadium during St. Louis Cardinals games in red clothes and paint. His social media footprint showed how he was radicalized—and how he trusted both Trump and Carlson over reliable sources of news. “This is so true!” he wrote on Facebook while sharing a Carlson clip. “Tucker nails it again!” he wrote on another Fox video. On January 6, he used a stolen police shield to help the mob push past the police. He fessed up to the crime in a Facebook video the night of the attack.

But in December 2021, Carlson turned on his big fan, airing video of Donnelly in red face paint and expressing doubt that Donnelly was truly a Trump fan. Carlson welcomed a guest who said Donnelly was “clearly a law enforcement officer” and an “agent provocateur.” This deeply offended Donnelly, who told NBC he believed Carlson “was a responsible reporter focused on stopping ‘fake news’ ”—until Carlson’s show lied about him.

Donnelly learned Carlson’s true colors the hard way. In March 2024 he pleaded guilty to a felony, civil disorder, for his part in the attack. With that, another Carlson lie disintegrated. But by then, the former Fox host had moved on. That’s how the “cloud of confusion” worked. Cheseboro was even more right than he knew.