Why the ‘Brooks Brothers riot’ of 2000 inspired Trump’s campaign operative in 2020

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“Make them riot,” a Donald Trump campaign operative said the day after Election Day in 2020, when Trump supporters were converging on the massive vote counting center in Detroit as votes were being counted. “Do it!!!” the operative added.

The request for a “riot” was similar to efforts in other swing states by Trump’s campaign in 2020, according to newly unsealed allegations filed by special counsel Jack Smith in federal court in Washington, DC.

It also echoes through the last 25 years of American politics, since the Trump operative, identified only as Person 5, had been warned there could be unrest reminiscent of the infamous “Brooks Brothers riot” that helped stop a recount in Miami-Dade County weeks after Election Day in 2000.

That 2000 episode looms large in the memory of people who lived through the election of hanging chads – perhaps in part because it has the benefit of a catchy nickname, which was meant to impart that the well-dressed Republican operatives were part of an army of lawyers and staffers that flooded into Florida. They were dressed supposedly in clothes from Brooks Brothers rather than whatever people in Miami might have been wearing at the time.

For the Trump campaign four years ago in 2020, according to Smith’s filing, disruption was the aim. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and said the legal cases against him are all part of a “witch hunt.” He won’t get a chance to present a defense against Smith’s allegations before Election Day, but that’s because his strategy of delaying the case has been very effective.

Smith lays out his new case against Trump

Smith recalibrated and pruned his accusations against Trump, which were first filed over a year ago, after the Supreme Court granted Trump a new, special immunity for anything that could be construed as official conduct during his presidency.

The details of these accusations, which seem to amount to an expression of Smith’s entire case against Trump, were unsealed Wednesday by Judge Tanya Chutkan, a Barack Obama nominee. They shed new light on what Smith and his colleagues learned during months of investigation and grand jury testimony.

CNN’s justice team has a much longer and more thorough look at the accusations, which include that the FBI has been able to essentially recreate what Trump was doing on his phone as the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot unfolded.

Recalling the Brooks Brothers riot

It’s worth focusing in on the Brooks Brothers riot of 2000 and comparing it with the request for a Detroit riot in 2020. Smith’s allegation could be as much a warning as a history lesson if, as many expect, counting and recounting ballots in the election next month stretches well past Election Day. Republicans have made no secret of their plans to deploy 100,000 supporters to keep a close eye on the counting of ballots in swing states.

Comparisons between what the Trump campaign tried in 2020 and what the George W. Bush campaign did in 2000 are not new.

Douglas Heye, a former CNN political commentator who has a long history working in Republican politics, made the connection in near real time, and he said what Republicans were doing in 2020 was nothing like what occurred in 2000.

Heye should know, since he was part of the Brooks Brothers riot.

“Then, we fought to make sure every vote counted,” Heye wrote in The Washington Post in November 2020 after seeing protesters loudly chanting and trying to disrupt the counting of votes in Detroit and elsewhere. Those Trump supporters, he argued, were “trying to thwart the effort to make sure that all legally cast votes are accurately counted.”

Heye documented his recollections of the Brooks Brothers riot, which included frustration at poll watchers – who are a recognized part of the election process – when they were locked out of a room where disputed ballots were being examined.

While Heye is more focused right now on the devastation from Hurricane Helene in his home state of North Carolina, I reached out to ask if the intervening four years had changed anything for him.

“We protested so that there could be election observers and media present, instead of vote counting being done in secret. That part was usually ignored in media reports at the time,” he told me by email. “Shouldn’t that remain the standard regardless of who the candidates are?”

The outrage model

Others have a dimmer view of the Brooks Brothers riot. The Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer wrote for CNN just before the 2020 election that the Brooks Brothers riot was a key early example of the GOP “weaponizing outrage,” and he predicted Trump and his allies would go to great lengths to dispute the election outcome. That wasn’t exactly an outlier prediction since Trump had been alleging, falsely, that the 2020 election was being rigged against him.

Reading that a Trump campaign operative was trying to coordinate a “riot” in Detroit, from that perspective, should not exactly be a surprise. This year, Trump is again saying the only way he can lose is through fraud, although there’s no evidence of widespread fraud.

“This moment builds on two to three decades of an increasingly radicalized party,” Zelizer told me by email. “We saw with the Brooks Brothers riot how media-attention grabbing theatrical chaos was an essential part of the strategy, shift attention away from damaging issues while also creating the impression that things are out of control – with the underlying argument that the GOP is needed to bring those things back together.”

The Brooks Brothers riot may be completely different than what occurred in 2020, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a model – shouting down a recount – current Republican operatives will try to replicate.

The 2000 election was ultimately decided when the US Supreme Court on December 12 of that year, a few weeks after the November 22 Brooks Brothers riot, put an end to recounts in Florida.

As CNN’s Supreme Court expert Joan Biskupic has noted, the current Supreme Court includes three justices – John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – who, while they weren’t among the shouting lawyers in Miami, worked on behalf of the Bush campaign in Florida during the recounts that year.

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