Who Fueled Donald Trump’s Stolen Election Myth?

In the days and weeks after the November 2020 U.S. presidential election, correspondent A.C. Thompson, who has been reporting on far-right extremism for FRONTLINE and ProPublica for years, was in Washington, D.C., covering clashes in the streets.

He’d soon turn his attention elsewhere.

“I didn’t realize that something far more consequential was happening in the hotel suites around me: a plot to undermine and overturn the election,” Thompson says.

Details of that effort unfold in Plot to Overturn the Election, a new documentary from FRONTLINE and ProPublica investigating how false claims of election fraud made their way to the center of American politics.

“I want to understand the stolen election myth,” Thompson says in the opening moments of the film. “Where did it come from? Who’s behind it? And how is the ongoing battle over the last election threatening the next one?”

In the documentary, directed by Samuel Black and premiering March 29 on PBS and online, Thompson (Documenting Hate: Charlottesville; Documenting Hate: New American Nazis; American Insurrection), with reporting from his ProPublica colleagues Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg, shows how a small group of Trump supporters helped create some of the core narratives of fraud that President Donald Trump and many others would go on to champion after the election.

The film illustrates how the legacy of their campaign extends beyond the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, influencing growing movements to audit the vote in battleground states, to alter election law and to elect Republican candidates who support the false assertion that the election was stolen.

Their campaign has found traction, the documentary shows. More than a year after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, around two-thirds of Republican voters believe his election was illegitimate — an idea that is now a defining issue of the Republican Party.

“What began as a plot to overturn the last election has evolved into something much bigger,” Thompson says in the film. Now, he says, it’s “a mass movement that is already shaping elections to come.”

For the full story, watch Plot to Overturn the Election, part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica, below. The documentary is also available to stream in our film archive, in the PBS Video App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.