{"id":32511,"date":"2024-03-27T13:43:29","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T20:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=32511"},"modified":"2024-03-27T13:43:30","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T20:43:30","slug":"biden-is-building-a-superstructure-to-stop-trump-from-stealing-the-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/03\/27\/biden-is-building-a-superstructure-to-stop-trump-from-stealing-the-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden Is Building a \u2018Superstructure\u2019 to Stop Trump From Stealing the Election"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley\/Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"BidenPresident Joe Biden. (photo: Patrick Semansky\/AP)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

26 march 24<\/strong> (RSN.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Trump and his MAGA allies have been working for years to pre-rig the 2024 election. Here\u2019s how Team Biden is planning to fight them<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For years, Donald Trump<\/a> has made it abundantly<\/a> clear that if he doesn\u2019t win the<\/a> 2024 presidential election<\/a>, he is willing to cheat and steal it. Since President Joe Biden<\/a>\u2019s 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 Lie<\/a>\u2013fueled<\/a> crusade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long before Trump began leading in battleground-state polling \u2014 and years before he was a declared 2024 candidate \u2014 the ex-president and many of his influential allies were already busy plotting ways to tilt the<\/a> election in his favor. These yearslong efforts, conducted both secretly and out in the open, have already yielded tangible results for Trump<\/a> and the conservative election<\/a> denier movement<\/a>. These wide-ranging operations have alarmed the Democratic Party elite, who aren\u2019t just worried about Biden\u2019s sagging poll numbers<\/a>. Numerous Democratic lawmakers, operatives, Biden campaign advisers, and administration officials tell Rolling Stone<\/em> that if the president does ultimately beat Trump this November, the election will be exceedingly close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, \u201call-hell-breaks-loose\u201d scenarios. The preparations include planning for a contingency in which Biden\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPresident Biden has been worried, for a while now, that Donald Trump is going to try to steal the election, if it\u2019s very<\/em> close on Election Day,\u201d says a source familiar with Biden\u2019s thinking. \u201cIf that ends up being the case, we are\u2026 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 doesn\u2019t happen \u2014 again \u2014 if President Biden wins and Trump and MAGA Republicans try to confuse [everyone] and sow chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the 2020 race was called for Biden, Trump and much of the GOP embarked on a sprawling campaign \u2014 a blitz of lawsuits, rabid conspiracy theories, attempts to block certification, and slates of fake electors \u2014 to nullify Biden\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time around, the race could be much closer, and Trump\u2019s efforts appear significantly more organized. He also has more of the party\u2019s elite behind him and his anti-democratic election lies than he had during the last presidential election. If the 2024 election<\/a> margins end up being wafer-thin, that level of institutional backing could, of course, redound to Trump\u2019s benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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 \u201cknife fight to the death\u201d on, and likely in the wake of, Election Day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Team Biden\u2019s 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, \u201cmake Florida in 2000 look like child\u2019s play.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sources in and around the president\u2019s legal and political operations say the Biden campaign\u2019s current wargaming is informed by questions aides asked themselves in the wake of the 2020 election: What if there\u2019s a rematch in four years with Donald Trump? What do we do if Joe Biden wins and Trump tries to steal the election again?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bidenworld spent a lot of time pondering such a scenario even before the 2020 election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, Biden\u2019s campaign brass began preemptively working through different nightmare scenarios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 Biden\u2019s inauguration, even if the swearing-in had already concluded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBiden HQ and the lawyers were essentially preparing for every insane scenario that anyone could think of, so that the campaign wouldn\u2019t be stuck in neutral if the worst actually transpired,\u201d says one attorney familiar with the extensive 2020 wargaming. \u201cEven then, I\u2019m not sure everybody was predicting just how crazy it would become and what Trump would actually do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Team Biden has been planning for years sketching out what Trump could<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One swing-state Democratic election official involved with these efforts refers to it as a \u201csuperstructure\u201d of various legal teams and liberal operatives who \u201care 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bidenworld\u2019s closely-held list of nightmare scenarios \u2014 in which Democratic legal teams would have to battle it out tooth and nail with Republican counterparts before, during, or after Election Day 2024 \u2014 has grown \u201ccomically long,\u201d says one source with direct knowledge of the matter. Biden campaign officials and other Democrats familiar with the topic tell Rolling Stone <\/em>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> refuse to certify a Biden victory<\/a> \u2014 an act that prominent GOP politicians, including on Capitol Hill, have publicly dangled as<\/a> an option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee tells Rolling Stone<\/em> that the national party is also setting aside \u201ctens 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMeanwhile, 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\u2019 ballots to be counted,\u201d says the DNC spokesperson. \u201cWe won\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 trust\u2019s goals of cementing their \u201cheads I win, tails you lose\u201d philosophy of election administration<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump, after all, has continued to falsely claim that the 2016 presidential race was somehow \u201crigged<\/a>\u201d in Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton\u2019s favor. And that was the election he won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley\/Rolling Stone President Joe Biden. (photo: Patrick Semansky\/AP) 26 march 24 (RSN.org) Trump and his MAGA allies have been working for years to pre-rig the 2024 election. Here\u2019s how Team Biden is planning to fight them For years, Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that if he doesn\u2019t win… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32511"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32512,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32511\/revisions\/32512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}