LogFAQs > #979584838

Democratic aides walked through a range of authoritarian possibilities, including one scenario in which Trump called out the National Guard either as a show of force or in an attempt to enforce his fictitious victory, the sources say. Another scenario involved gameplans for how to handle Trump refusing to leave the White House the day of Bidens inauguration, even if the swearing-in had already concluded.

Biden HQ and the lawyers were essentially preparing for every insane scenario that anyone could think of, so that the campaign wouldnt be stuck in neutral if the worst actually transpired, says one attorney familiar with the extensive 2020 wargaming. Even then, Im not sure everybody was predicting just how crazy it would become and what Trump would actually do.

Any attempt by Trump to try and undermine the 2024 election would likely look different than 2020, if only because he lacks the legal authority and access to federal resources he enjoyed as president.

Still, Team Biden has been planning for years sketching out what Trump could do as the leader of the GOP, and has partnered with the Democratic National Committee and a vast network of liberal attorneys and legal groups to conduct similar doomsday-style wargaming.

One swing-state Democratic election official involved with these efforts refers to it as a superstructure of various legal teams and liberal operatives who are going to fight [Team Trump and election deniers] on all fronts and let them have it from all sides, if MAGA wants to tear down our democracy.

According to two Biden campaign officials and two other sources with knowledge of the operation, draft pleadings and legal motions, for all kinds of possible Trump-related emergencies, are already written and at the ready. In critical swing states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, Team Biden is regularly in contact with an array of outside counsels and local law firms that have been retained to actively monitor what is happening on the ground, including with regards to the activism of election-denying Trump allies.

Bidenworlds closely-held list of nightmare scenarios in which Democratic legal teams would have to battle it out tooth and nail with Republican counterparts before, during, or after Election Day 2024 has grown comically long, says one source with direct knowledge of the matter. Biden campaign officials and other Democrats familiar with the topic tell Rolling Stone that a key concern, for which step-by-step gameplanning has already begun, is how to robustly respond if Trump and other leading Republicans try to engineer another Jan. 6-style power grab.

In these internal wargames among Bidenworld and Democratic attorneys in key states, this kind of Jan. 6 sequel has included scripts in which House Republicans or state officials refuse to certify a Biden victory an act that prominent GOP politicians, including on Capitol Hill, have publicly dangled as an option.

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee tells Rolling Stone that the national party is also setting aside tens of millions of dollars in a robust voter protection program to safeguard the rights of voters to make their voices heard against relentless attacks from Donald Trump and the GOP.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign and the RNC have invested in an army of conspiratorial, election-denying legal staff to undermine our elections and make it harder for Americans ballots to be counted, says the DNC spokesperson. We wont let Republicans get away with these baseless attacks on our democracy, and we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to strengthen our democracy as MAGA extremists attempt to tear it down.

Of course, if much of the current national and swing-state polling holds, Trump could defeat his successor outright in a 2024 rematch. However, that is almost irrelevant to Trump and his MAGA brain trusts goals of cementing their heads I win, tails you lose philosophy of election administration.

Trump, after all, has continued to falsely claim that the 2016 presidential race was somehow rigged in Democratic nominee Hillary Clintons favor. And that was the election he won.