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For years, Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that if he doesnt win the 2024 presidential election, he is willing to cheat and steal it. Since President Joe Bidens inaugural address, according to sources with intimate knowledge of the situation, Biden and his inner circle have been drawing up meticulous plans and creating a large legal network focused on wargaming a close election finish, in which the former president and Republican Party launch a scorched-earth, Big Liefueled crusade.

Long before Trump began leading in battleground-state polling and years before he was a declared 2024 candidate the ex-president and many of his influential allies were already busy plotting ways to tilt the election in his favor. These yearslong efforts, conducted both secretly and out in the open, have already yielded tangible results for Trump and the conservative election denier movement. These wide-ranging operations have alarmed the Democratic Party elite, who arent just worried about Bidens sagging poll numbers. Numerous Democratic lawmakers, operatives, Biden campaign advisers, and administration officials tell Rolling Stone that if the president does ultimately beat Trump this November, the election will be exceedingly close.

Over the past year, Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, all-hell-breaks-loose scenarios. The preparations include planning for a contingency in which Bidens margin of victory is so razor-thin that Trump and the GOP launch a tidal wave of legal challenges and political maneuvers to rerun his 2020 election strategy: declare victory anyways, and try to will it into existence.

President Biden has been worried, for a while now, that Donald Trump is going to try to steal the election, if its very close on Election Day, says a source familiar with Bidens thinking. If that ends up being the case, we are also expecting the Republican Party to go into overdrive to help him steal it. We are continuing to build out the infrastructure to ensure that doesnt happen again if President Biden wins and Trump and MAGA Republicans try to confuse [everyone] and sow chaos.

After the 2020 race was called for Biden, Trump and much of the GOP embarked on a sprawling campaign a blitz of lawsuits, rabid conspiracy theories, attempts to block certification, and slates of fake electors to nullify Bidens clear win. This culminated in the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which Trump instigated, and led to years of criminal investigations and various indictments, as well as the mainstreaming of the MAGA election-denial movement. The efforts to overturn the election were unsuccessful, largely because Biden had won too many battleground states unlike when the 2000 presidential race came down to the single state of Florida, and the Republican Party was able to successfully halt the recount of an extremely close vote.

This time around, the race could be much closer, and Trumps efforts appear significantly more organized. He also has more of the partys elite behind him and his anti-democratic election lies than he had during the last presidential election. If the 2024 election margins end up being wafer-thin, that level of institutional backing could, of course, redound to Trumps benefit.

Top officials in both the Trump and Biden camps are expecting an uncomfortably tight election outcome in November, sources in both campaigns have told Rolling Stone on numerous occasions over the past year. Advisers to both candidates say they expect the race will turn on a margin of just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of key battleground states, if not a single state. One Trump adviser says that they had privately told the ex-president and presumptive 2024 GOP nominee to anticipate an electoral knife fight to the death on, and likely in the wake of, Election Day.

Team Bidens in-house counsels and network of outside lawyers are currently preparing legal strategies for scenarios involving recounts that would make, in the words of one Biden official, make Florida in 2000 look like childs play.

Sources in and around the presidents legal and political operations say the Biden campaigns current wargaming is informed by questions aides asked themselves in the wake of the 2020 election: What if theres a rematch in four years with Donald Trump? What do we do if Joe Biden wins and Trump tries to steal the election again?

Bidenworld spent a lot of time pondering such a scenario even before the 2020 election.

In the months leading up to November 2020, Trump offered repeated, public signals that he would try to delegitimize any outcome in which he lost the election. As the threats mounted, Bidens campaign brass began preemptively working through different nightmare scenarios.

That prep work accelerated in the final weeks of the campaign as an armada of lawyers, numbering in the hundreds, sketched out various unconventional scenarios in which the then-president tried to cling to power in the face of defeat, according to current and former senior Biden campaign officials.