On the evening of October 31, 2020, Steve Bannon told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night—even if he was losing. That’s the big take-out from a leaked tape, obtained exclusively by Mother Jones, which provides stunning new details about Trump’s plan to falsely declare victory while tens of millions of votes were still being counted.

Trump knew that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for him in key states. His “strategy” was to use this fact to falsely assert that he had won, while claiming that the inevitable shifts in votes toward Joe Biden must be the result of fraud, Bannon explained in the nearly hour-long audio recording.

“What Trump’s gonna do, is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner,” Bannon, laughing, told the group. “He’s just gonna say he’s the winner.”

The recording stands out for the striking candor and detail with which Bannon described a scheme to use lies to subvert democracy. Bannon also predicted that Trump’s false declaration of victory would lead to widespread political violence, along with “crazy” efforts by Trump to stay in office. Bannon and his associates laughed about those scenarios at various points in the recording. Bannon and his attorney, Robert Costello, did not respond to questions about the recording.