Using a role-playing game that is an element of national security and military planning, the group envisioned a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day, one in which Trump and his Republican allies used all Government apparatuses: the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military, to retain power, and Democrats went to court and the streets to try to stop it.
Whether it sounds paranoid or flamboyant, a war room of seasoned politicians and constitutional experts playing a Washington version of Dungeons and Dragons in which the future of the republic is at stake, they get it. But when they finalize a report on what they learned and start reporting to elected officials and others, they insist their warning is serious: closed elections are likely to take place this fall, and there are few barriers to stopping a constitutional crisis, especially if Trump flexes the considerable tools at his disposal to give himself an advantage.
“You don’t have to win the election,” said Nils Gilman, a historian who leads the research at an expert group called the Berggruen Institute and was the organizer of the exercise. “You just have to create a plausible narrative that you didn’t lose.”
The very existence of a group like this, which was formed late last year, underscores the degree of fear in political circles in Washington, and beyond, that Trump will take the same hammer he has used to fracture government regulations. executive over the past three years and change the nation’s delicate tradition of orderly political power transitions by refusing to budge if it loses.
“We have rules in our transition, rather than laws,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Foundation Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program, which was not part of the game. “This entire election season is something a democracy expert would be concerned about.”
It is a fear that has been fueled by the president himself, who has repeatedly warned, without offering evidence, of widespread fraud involving mail-in ballots, that voters will likely use at unprecedented levels because the pandemic has made in-person voting at risk potential for health: questioning the results of the November elections.
“I think voting by mail is going to manipulate the election, I really do,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace last Sunday. When asked if he would accept the election results, he said, “I will have to see.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the alleged Democratic candidate, has been tasked with issuing his own warnings. “This president will try to indirectly steal the elections by arguing that the ballot-by-mail does not work, it is not real, it is not fair,” he said at a fundraiser on Thursday night. He has also publicly reflected that Trump should be escorted, by force if necessary, from the White House.
That happened in one of four scenarios that the Transition Integrity Project developed, according to exercise summaries provided to The Boston Globe. But constitutional experts, and the game, were less focused on the possibility of a cinematic and militarized intervention on Inauguration Day, which is a possibility that many still consider remote, than the room that the Constitution seems to leave for a disastrous transition. and difficult if the owner does not accept a loss.
“How well is our constitutional legal system designed to deal with a sitting president who insists that he won an election, but because of the presence of fraud?” said Lawrence Douglas, a professor at Amherst College who wrote a book on what would happen if Trump took that position. “And I think the rather unfortunate answer is that our system is not well designed to deal with that problem,” said Douglas, who was not involved in the game.
Brooks got the seed for the idea for the Transition Integrity Project after a dinner in which a federal judge and a corporate lawyer told him they were convinced that the Army or the Secret Service would have to escort Trump out of office if he lost the elections and he would. Do not grant. Brooks was not so sure. She and Gilman decided to turn Washington’s parlor game into a real exercise; They held an early meeting in Washington, with about 25 people, in December.
“When we started talking about this, we had a lot of reactions. Oh, you guys are so paranoid, don’t be ridiculous, this is not going to happen,” Brooks said.
Since then, two things have happened: Trump has shown a greater willingness to challenge mail ballots, and his administration has deployed federal forces to quell protests outside the White House and in Portland, Oregon, and has threatened to do so in others. cities
“That has really rocked people,” said Brooks. “What was really a marginal idea has now become an anxiety that is quite shared.”
Brooks, Gilman, and others recruited a list of players, including a former state governor, a former White House chief of staff, and a former chief of the Department of Homeland Security. They invited both Democrats and Republicans who they knew had concerns about Trump’s comments on the election; Almost 80 people participated in total. Participants described Republicans as “never Trump” or “non-Trump Republicans.”
They played using the so-called Chatham House Rules, in which participants can discuss what was said, but not who was there; some participants were willing to be named. They included Republicans Trey Grayson, the former Kentucky Secretary of State and conservative commentator Bill Kristol, as well as Democrats Leah Daughtry, who was CEO of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Convention Committees, the former tsar of ethics from the White House, Norm Eisen, and the progressive Democrat. strategist Adam Jentleson.
The game was elaborated. Participants took on the roles of the Trump campaign, the Biden campaign, relevant government officials, and the media (Democrats generally played Democrats and Republicans played Republicans) and used a 10-sided die to determine if a team was successful in its movement attempts. . Games are not intended to be predictive; rather, they are supposed to give people an idea of the possible consequences in complex scenarios.
Each scenario implied a different electoral result: an unclear Election Day result that increasingly resembled a Biden victory as more ballots were counted; a clear victory for Biden in the popular vote and the Electoral College; an Electoral College victory for Trump with Biden winning the popular vote by 5 percentage points; and a narrow electoral college and a popular vote victory for Biden.
On stage, the team playing the Trump campaign often questioned the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, which often drove Biden as they entered: they closed post offices, pursued litigation, and used the right-wing media to amplify narratives about a stolen election. .
For some participants, the game was a clear reminder of the power of incumbency.
“The more demonstrations there were, the more demands for recount, the more legal challenges there were, the more funerals for democracy, the more Trump stood as the candidate for stability,” said Edward Luce, the US editor of the Financial Times, who played the role of media reporter during one of the simulations. “Possession is nine tenths of the law.”
In multiple scenarios, officials on both sides focused on narrowly determined decisive states with divided governments, such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida, hoping to persuade officials there to essentially send two different results to Congress. If one state’s elections are contested, a legislature controlled by one party and a governor from another could send opposing lists of voters to support their party’s candidate.
Both sides produced massive street protests that Trump tried to control: in one scenario, he invoked the Law of Insurrection, which allows the president to use the military to calm the unrest. The scenario that started with a narrow Biden victory ended when Trump refused to leave the White House, burned government documents, and had to be escorted by the Secret Service. (Meanwhile, the team playing against Biden in that scenario, tried to work things out with Republicans by appointing moderate Republican governors, including Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, to cabinet positions.)
However, the scenario that produced the most controversial dynamic was in which Trump won the Electoral College, and therefore the election, but Biden won the popular vote by 5 percentage points. Biden’s team retracted its Election Night concession, fueled by Democrats angry at losing other elections despite capturing the popular vote, as happened in 2000 and 2016. In the simulated election, Trump tried to divide the Democrats. At one point, he gave an interview to The Intercept, a left-wing media outlet that says Senator Bernie Sanders would have won if Democrats had nominated him. Meanwhile, Biden’s team sought to encourage big western states to separate unless reforms in favor of democracy were made.
That scenario seemed far-fetched, but it foresaw a situation where both sides could have incentives to contest the elections.
“There is a narrative among activists in both parties that the loss must be illegitimate,” he said.
According to the Constitution, the presidency ends at noon on January 20, at which time the newly inaugurated president becomes the commander-in-chief.
The games were ultimately designed to explore how difficult it could be to get there.
“The Constitution has really been a viable document in many ways because we have had people who more or less adhered to a code of conduct,” said retired Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, a Republican and former chief of staff for Colin Powell who participated in the games. as an observer “That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. That changes everything. “
Jess Bidgood can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @jessbidgood.
