Before Election Day has even arrived, the “Stop the Steal” movement has reemerged in force, with some of the same activists who tried to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss outlining a step-by-step guide to undermine the results if he falls short again.
For months, those activists – who have been priming Trump supporters to believe the only way the former president can lose in 2024 is through fraud – have laid out proposals to thwart a potential Kamala Harris victory. Their plans include challenging results in court, pressuring lawmakers to block election certification, and encouraging protests – culminating on January 6, 2025, the day Congress will once again certify the results.
“I have a plan and strategy,” Ivan Raiklin, a former Green Beret and political operative who has close ties to associates of Trump, told a group of Pennsylvania activists earlier this month. “And then January 6th is going to be pretty fun.”
Trump’s allies – and the former president himself – are increasingly pushing debunked claims of voter fraud, spreading their rhetoric through podcasts with massive audiences, megachurch sermons and political rallies in key states. Some Trump backers, including pastors associated with Christian nationalist ideas, have described the election as a fight between good and evil, describing Harris as the antichrist or suggesting that God has anointed Trump as the victor.
Four years ago, Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden didn’t truly materialize until after the election. They were largely improvised and ad hoc, with a flurry of hastily filed lawsuits that went nowhere and efforts to convince state legislators to block certification that fell short.
But this time around, MAGA activists have been planning to undermine a potential Harris victory well in advance of the election, with some even arguing that state legislators should simply ignore the election results and award electoral votes to Trump by default.
Congress passed a measure in 2022 that makes it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, and with Trump now out of office, he and his allies cannot wield levers of the executive branch to try to influence the election. But experts say that the people involved in these conspiracy theory-driven efforts appear to be better organized, more determined and, in some cases, more extreme than four years ago….
Federal law enforcement officials are also ringing alarm bells. A bulletin put out earlier this month by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence warned that extremist rhetoric about the election could motivate people to “engage in violence, as we saw during the 2020 election cycle.”…