Former President Donald Trump sought to return to power months after his defeat in the 2020 election by urging Republican Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks to call for a special election that would reinstall him as president.
The attempt, part of a broader effort to overturn the election results, is detailed in famed Watergate journalist Bob Woodward’s upcoming book War, which offers new insights into Trump’s relentless pursuit to invalidate Joe Biden‘s victory four years ago.
By June 2021, six months after Biden’s inauguration, Trump continued to privately push claims of a “stolen election,” according to Woodward’s book. Trump reportedly told his aides that he expected to return to the White House by August 2021, a date that coincided with false predictions circulated by QAnon conspiracy theorists.
“He had an army. An army for Trump. He wants that back,” Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale is quoted as saying. “I don’t think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance.”
Former U.S. President Donald Trump (R) welcomes candidate for U.S. Senate and U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) to the stage during a “Save America” rally at York Family Farms on August 21, 2021 in Cullman, Alabama. Bob Woodwards’s latest book reveals that Trump called Brooks, a loyal supporter, and asked him to lead a public push for a special election to reinstate him as president.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The book reveals that Trump called Brooks, at that point a loyal supporter, and asked him to lead a public push for a special election to reinstate him as president. Brooks had previously aligned himself with Trump’s legal efforts to challenge the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.
However, Brooks refused this request, pointing out that Biden was the duly elected president and that there was no constitutional path to reverse the election results. According to Woodward, Brooks told Trump: “The Constitution provided no mechanism to reinstate a president.”
Brooks drawing the line at the prospect of a special election, even after having supported Trump’s prior attempts to challenge the results, ended his political career. His refusal reportedly infuriated Trump, who later retracted his endorsement of Brooks in Alabama’s 2022 Senate race, a move that contributed to Brooks’ loss in the Republican primary.
“Very sad but, since he decided to go in another direction, so have I, and I am hereby withdrawing my Endorsement of Mo Brooks for the Senate,” Trump said in March 2021, after accusing him of “going woke” for suggesting it was time to move on from Trump’s false 2020 election fraud claims.
Brooks, at the time stinging from Trump’s rebuke, laughed at Trump’s characterization that he was “woke” and said he and Trump fell out because he rebuffed the former president’s entreaties to help overturn the 2020 election, matching what Woodward reported in his upcoming book.
“He wanted the election rescinded and a do-over,” Brooks told reporters at the time. “But there’s no legal way to do it.”
Woodward’s book, set to be published Tuesday, provides further details about Trump’s failed attempts to overturn the election, as well as other insider information, including Trump secretly sending COVID-19 tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin when they were hard to come by during the pandemic, President Biden’s frustrations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman‘s use of burner phones.
