Bashing Heads for Don

A new documentary about MAGA violence is required viewing.

“It doesn't matter if you won or lost the election — you still have to fight like hell.” – Donald Trump after the 2020 election, according to Jack Smith’s latest filing.

Pollsters consistently find that swing voters and even some Republicans don’t take Trump seriously. They don’t believe he is more than a blustery politician — not the leader of a violent authoritarian personality cult who will really carry out mass deportation of supposed undesirables and retribution against his domestic political enemies. 

A visceral new documentary — available digitally starting next week — filmed from inside the front lines at the January 6 insurrection and melees in the months before, is a critical reminder to anyone who forgot or never believed Trump is capable of unleashing political violence. 

The film, 64 Days, premiered in New York last week. Nick Quested, a British documentary maker who worked with the American author Sebastian Junger on an award-winning film in Afghanistan, gathered such revealing footage that the House January 6 committee brought him in to testify. 

Quested and his team set out to cover BLM rallies in the summer of 2020, making what he thought would be a film about the divisions in America, but ended up covering what he calls “a division worse than I ever feared, a division stoked further by Donald Trump” in the months after the election. He ended up embedded with the Proud Boys. 

This slice from two months of American political mayhem is presented chronologically with election day 2020 as Day 1 and Day 64 being January 6. Quested narrates part of it and also lets people he interviews tell the story, starring Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio — now serving 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. The filmmakers spent a lot of time around two leaders, Ali Alexander and Roger Stone, men with curiously matching feral underbites. The two men — understudy and mastermind — fronted Stop the Steal, “a call to arms” that Stone had schemed up four years prior, in the event Hillary won. 

Proud Boy Tarrio, a Cuban American anti-communist who never steps out without a bulletproof vest, seems affable in comparison to that duo — although he’s clearly twitching to throw a punch. “We did what the cops won’t do and cleaned up the fucking street,” he shouts after his comrades, in one of the shocking moments Quested captured, beat a BLM protester’s head and then kicked him when he went down on a DC street.

Tarrio’s sidekick, a tall man with a huge Viking beard, Jeremy Bertino, whose nom de guerre is “Noblebeard,” is plainly terrifying. The filmmakers stuck close to Noblebeard as the Boys roamed Washington in the days between the election and the insurrection, looking for BLM and Antifa to kick the shit out of. 

In one horrific scene, they sight a lone black resident of DC, Philip Johnson, who had the bad timing to exit a parking garage as the gang was passing by. Utterly unprovoked, they cornered him against a wall and went at him. Johnson protected himself with a knife, sending Noblebeard to the hospital for months, forcing him to miss the insurrection. Johnson was charged with assault with a deadly weapon — although the footage makes his actions look like self-defense. Noblebeard later pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy.

The filmmakers took their cameras beyond  DC, filming inside enraged mobs - larger and less professional than the gang of Republican operatives who staged the Brooks Brothers riot in Florida to stop the Bush-Gore recount in 2000 -  trying to stop the counting of the vote in Detroit. There, a Michigan Trump campaign operative urged his colleagues to “make them riot.” “Stop the Count, Stop the Count,” the crowd chanted outside a Detroit government office. The filmmakers also captured a mob outside a Mesa County government building after Fox called Arizona for Trump. “I started seeing protestors accosting election workers,” one Arizona official recalls..“One night it was count the vote and the next night it was stop counting,” he recalls.

As Trump ratcheted up the Big Lie in the weeks after the election, anyone who tried to follow the rule of law was subject to vigilante abuse. Rusty Bowers, the then Arizona House Speaker, refused to go along with the fake electors scheme. Alerted by Trump to his disobedience, protesters mobbed his quiet desert street, menacing both him and his neighbors. On camera, Bowers chokes up as he tells the filmmakers that this all played out while his adult daughter was dying inside their house.

The film identifies Day 47, mid-December 2020, as a pivotal moment in the increasingly desperate Trumpworld’s willingness to turn toward force and violence. That day, three extremist oddballs — lawyer Sidney Powell, Q Anon Gen. Mike Flynn, and tech billionaire Patrick Byrne — made their way into the Oval Office and started telling Trump how he could seize voting machines. White House staff got wind of the meeting and raced over to stop it, arriving in time to hear Byrne explaining that he would bring in the National Guard to help him hold power. As Byrne tells the filmmakers, with a smirk, when White House staff argued with the visitors, Trump broke up the meeting himself and invited Flynn, Byrne, and Powell up to the residence. Shortly after they left late at night, he invited his minions to Washington on January 6: “Will be Wild.” 

The Proud Boys and the rest of the mob clearly took that to be a green light for violence. They converged on DC itching for a fight and the President and his family egged them on. “You can be a hero or you can be a zero,” Donny Jr. shouts to the crowd in one scene just before the mob marches on the Capitol. “The choice is yours but we are all watching!” Trump and his family then did indeed watch, from the barricaded safety and comfort of the White House. 

The film is a visual aid to keep minds focused on what can happen again. At the premiere in Manhattan last week, Quested spoke of how the experience left him so shaken that he was ill for weeks after. “Most shocking to me was that these groups said exactly what they would do, and then they did it,” Quested concluded.

What does all this mean for the 64 days between this election day on November 5, 2025 and the inauguration of America’s next president on January 21, 2025? Even if the election is a landslide for Harris, which isn’t looking likely, expect a replay of chaos, with the key difference that the ultimate beneficiary of that chaos doesn’t hold the infinite power of the executive, but whose organization has had four years to study the system’s weak spots and mobilize more shock troops.

One of my sources who asked not to be named because his outlook is so pessimistic, predicts the following between election and inauguration: “Lawfare on steroids; a media ecosystem unprepared for nuance, context, disinformation; Trump as a mob boss directing menacing threats to different electoral commissioners; Brooks Brothers 3.0 x hundreds; local sovereign sheriffs enabling subversion of elections and Trump unleashing the "Springfield" tactic on Democratic counties provoking bomb threats on counting centers. "They’re eating the dog, cats, and the ballots!” my source predicted.

Democrats are not unaware. Election lawyer Mark Elias and others are prepared to send legal SWAT teams to fight election chicanery in courts across the land. But it is up to tens of thousands of decent, earnest, unknown Americans on November 5 to protect the count, and to count every vote. It’s not at all clear that these people are going to be protected from the mobs who star in 64 Days.