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One yearSUVUS Your browser does not support the element. into Joe Biden’s presidency all the lawsuits were failing. The red-capped Trumpworld was desperate for hard evidence of what they knew in their hearts to be true: that the 2020 election was stolen.Enter Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative storyteller who Donald Trump pardoned for campaign-finance crimes. In 2022 he published “2,000 Mules”, a film that matched mobile-phone data to surveillance footage compiled by True the Vote, a Texas group, to allegedly show that leftist cabals had paid “mules” to stuff ballot boxes in swing states. In one clip a man steps out of a white to deposit a stack of envelopes into a dropbox in an Atlanta suburb. “What you are seeing is a crime,” Mr D’Souza explains in a voiceover. “These are fraudulent votes.”The film tied all the dubious claims of home-grown election-deniers across America into a neat bow—to tremendous effect. According to Salem Media, the distributor, it grossed $10m from 1m views in the first fortnight, making it, they say, “the most successful political documentary in a decade”. Donald Trump touted it as “irrefutable proof” that he was the race’s real victor, despite the fact that his own Justice Department had declared otherwise.But two-and-a-half years on Mr D’Souza has quietly rolled back the claims and apologised to the man in the van, who was found by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations to be legally dropping off ballots for his family members. On December 1st he wrote that he had “recently learned” that the video was not tied to the tracking data, discrediting the film’s core claim. He blamed True the Vote for misleading him. True the Vote retorted that it had “no editorial control” over which clips were “used for dramatic effect”.The admission marks the final unravelling of the weary stop-the-steal movement. “He was the biggest name holdout,” says Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Georgia’s secretary of state. But the diehards who may have been bothered that their gospel has turned out to be fiction have little reason to fret: the man who did most to spread it will soon be president again.
