‘January 6th is going to be pretty fun’: How MAGA activists are preparing to undermine the election if Trump loses

(CNN) — 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.”

Marc Harris, a former investigator for the House select committee that investigated January 6, 2021, told CNN he’s concerned that the tactics to undermine the election have evolved since 2020, even with the safeguards put into place since then.

“Those looking to overturn the election are way ahead of where they were in 2020,” said Harris. “But on the flip side, the pro-democracy defenders are also more prepared. How that shakes out is not clear to me.”

Baseless fears of a ‘steal’

Unfounded claims about malign forces conspiring to cheat Trump out of an otherwise inevitable election win have been increasing in recent weeks from influential members of the MAGA movement.

“Yes, the steal is happening again,” Emerald Robinson, a right-wing broadcaster with nearly 800,000 followers on X, declared in a blog post earlier this month, criticizing the fact that votes may take days to count in some states. “It doesn’t take days to get election results. It takes days to cheat.”

Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who donated millions of dollars to efforts investigating the 2020 election, warned on Telegram this week of a cyberattack that would rig the election and lead to imminent “death and cannibalism” unless Americans stand together.

And Greg Locke, a prominent Tennessee pastor who spoke near the Capitol the day before the January 6 riot, told his followers in a sermon earlier this month that the US would be hit with “a catastrophic storm that is going to be man-made” in the days before the election, as an apparent method of stealing the vote.

“If Kamala wins this election, hear me when I tell you, we will never have another one,” Locke predicted.

Some of the debunked ideas that surfaced after the 2020 election and sought to explain how Trump lost remain rampant, such as the notion that voting machines are flipping votes to favor Democrats or that election officials in swing states have been complicit in widespread voter fraud.

“The same systems are being used. Many of the same players are in place,” Joe Hoft, who has contributed to the conspiracy-theory-peddling website The Gateway Pundit, told CNN when asked about the 2024 election. “I don’t trust the process. The process is broken.”

In recent episodes of “War Room,” a prominent program airing election conspiracy theories started by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, guests have repeatedly suggested that Democratic governors in swing states or Democratic members of Congress could block certification of a legitimate Trump victory.

They’ve cited comments like Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin telling Axios earlier this month that he didn’t assume Trump would use “free, fair and honest” means to win – even though Raskin said he would “obviously accept” a Trump victory if it was honest.

“They call us election deniers all the time,” GOP Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on a “War Room” episode last week, in which she raised concerns about overseas military voting. “But it looks, it appears to be that there is a big fight being set up over the certification of the election and the outcome of the election.”

Greene has also floated a conspiracy theory that recent US Capitol Police training exercises are connected to a plan by congressional Democrats to keep Trump out of power even if he wins.

Trump himself has echoed some of the conspiracy theories pushed by his supporters, suggesting that election fraud is rampant in 2024. But party officials have struck a different tone.

“You can trust American elections,” Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and the Republican National Committee co-chair, said on a call with reporters Wednesday. Touting her party’s election-integrity efforts, she said that “we want to make people all across this country feel good about the process of voting in the United States of America.”

“President Trump, Team Trump, and the RNC have been incredibly consistent and clear: we are actively working to protect the vote and all Americans must get out and vote to make this election TOO BIG TO RIG,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, told CNN.

Plans to block a Harris win

While some groups have been gathering supposed examples of election fraud for lawsuits to challenge a potential Harris win, other pro-Trump activists have coalesced around a plan to ensure Trump returns to the White House: state legislators can simply allocate their state’s electors for Trump regardless of vote counts.

The strategy generated headlines last week after Rep. Andy Harris, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said it “makes a lot of sense” to allocate electors that way in North Carolina, where he suggested damage from Hurricane Helene may disenfranchise some voters.

Harris, who later walked back his comments, initially voiced support for the proposal after hearing a presentation from Raiklin, who’s known for having posted a memo that argued then-Vice President Mike Pence could have blocked certification of the 2020 election results.

Raiklin has been espousing the plan for legislators to seize control of awarding electoral votes in various states in recent weeks and receiving support from other far-right figures. Mark Finchem, a Republican candidate for state senate in Arizona, wrote on X that the “extraordinary circumstances” in North Carolina – a reference to the hurricane damage – “provide a justifiable pathway for the legislature to take action.”

Noel Fritsch, publisher of the far-right online publication National File, has argued that the US Constitution gives all state legislatures the power to choose electoral college members, which he told CNN he believes could create more national stability.

“Any movement toward direct democracy is, of course, as history shows, a move toward chaos, and that’s what we’re seeing,” Fritsch said. He cited arguments from some Republican Florida legislators who claimed they had the power to a select a slate of electors during the razor-thin 2000 presidential race.

But the recent proposal from people like Fritsch and Raiklin is rife with flaws, according to legal experts and officials. Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of North Carolina’s election board, called the proposal a “violation of law,” and officials in the state have said that voting is proceeding without major issues despite the impact of the hurricane.

Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told CNN that state legislatures would have to first repeal their laws that dictate how elections operate before appointing electors directly.

“It’s too late for the legislatures to act,” Muller said. “You’d have to go through and remove all those laws on the books, and if you’re doing that in the middle of this moment when there’s already elections happening, then you’re going to risk due process violation of changing the rules arbitrarily.”

Concerns about violence

Incidents of political violence and threats have already occurred this year, including two apparent attempts to assassinate Trump, shootings involving a DNC office and suspicious packages mailed to election offices.

In the weeks ahead of the election, some pro-Trump activists have been openly alluding to more violent chaos that they say is on the horizon.

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn said on a program last week that he thought Trump would win all 50 states if there’s a fair election but offered a grim prediction if the winner remains unknown for days.

“I feel like people are going to go to those locations where there’s counting and there could actually be violence because people are going to be, people are so upset after 2020,” said Flynn, who four years ago drew comparisons to Civil War battlefields in a speech the day before the Capitol riot.

Some extremists are already preparing “violent activity that they link to the narrative of an impending civil war, raising the risk of violence against government targets and ideological opponents,” according to a DHS memo from September obtained by the watchdog group Property of the People and shared with CNN.

Posts in recent months on the obscure message board 8kun, formerly 8chan, have called for violence against undocumented immigrants and urged “election steal defense prep,” while messages on a forum called “The Donald” encouraged violent shows of “force” to stop the “steal,” according to an October bulletin from Colorado’s Department of Public Safety also obtained by Property of the People.

On Telegram, violent rhetoric related to election denialism has more than quadrupled over the course of October, according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that tracks such content.

But unlike 2020, more extremist groups may have moved their discussions off public online forums and into private chats, hiding online conversations that may involve planning for the days after the election, said Devin Burghart, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonprofit that studies far-right movements.

Still others have cast the stakes of the election in foreboding, apocalyptic terms.

Speaking this month at a political rally known as the ReAwaken America Tour, Pastor Mark Burns of South Carolina called on supporters to keep Harris out of power by any means necessary.

“Is there anybody standing with me who would do whatever it takes to make sure she’s not the next president of the United States? Because we are at war,” Burns said. “This is about good versus evil, of a real enemy come from the gates of hell.”

Asked about his comments, Burns told CNN he was referring to spiritual war and that he condemns “talks of physical violence in any form if in the unlikely event that President Donald Trump loses the election.”

CNN’s Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.

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