The courts won't save us

The Brennan Center's 2025 wargame (ahem..."tabletop exercise")

Last month, I walked past an armed guard into a conference center at the Hilton Old Town Alexandria. I was there to observe the Brennan Center for Justice’s nonpartisan Democracy Futures Project exercise. (Not to be confused with PACE’s recently-launched initiative of the same name.)

The premise of the project: if Trump wins and begins to execute on the most extreme elements of his publicly-stated anti-democracy agenda, how might he be stopped?

The answer? Not easily. As The Guardian put it, attendees discovered a need to “sound the alarm about what most participants agreed was a woeful lack of preparation.”

Who was there?

It was an illustrious group of (mostly) DC insiders. There were:

• Former senior officials from the Obama, Bush, Clinton, and Trump (yes, Trump) administrations, including Cabinet secretaries,

• Former senators and members of Congress from both parties,

• Retired generals, including Richard Danzig, the navy secretary under Bill Clinton, and Major General Paul D. Eaton, and

• Civil society leaders including: journalists, faith leaders, union leaders, business leaders, and grassroots activists.

Other notables who agreed to be publicly named include: Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America.

What scenarios were explored?

There were five tabletop exercises: two virtual and three in person.

The two virtual exercises were “everything, everywhere, all at once,” while the in-person exercises focused on specific scenarios:

• Federal power: replacing career civil servants with compliant cronies and using DOJ, the IRS, and other agencies to go after…well…us. (Investigating and/or imprisoning political rivals and pro-democracy actors.)

• Immigration: mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and large-scale deportations.

• The Insurrection Act: domestic deployment of military forces into cities to quell protests or fight “anarchy and crime.”

Again, each scenario was based on what Trump has publicly said he aims to do. Yikes…

My take:

Attendees and organizers have already published thorough and thoughtful analyses of the exercises (linked in the final section below).

Here are a few of my takeaways:

• The courts won’t save us. Litigation is slow, SCOTUS isn’t the reliable bulwark we might’ve hoped, and there is no clear recourse if a president simply decides not to follow a court’s ruling.

• The courts won’t save us, and neither will business, labor, civil servants, or civil society. The scenarios unveiled a menacing collective-action problem. Business wasn’t going to stand up to Trump alone, and neither were the bureaucrats.

• Politics is the art of the possible — the art of realpolitik. If Trump decides to go “full autocrat,” he won’t be stopped by a court decision he doesn’t like. But he can be stopped.

• Our most potent tool is “people power” — nonviolent civil resistance: widespread noncompliance in the bureaucracy, defections by military and police unwilling to target peaceful protestors, work stoppages that grind the economy to a halt, and yes, persistent, large-scale protests.

Former Republican governor of New Jersey Christine Todd Whitman was asked by The Guardian to identify the biggest lesson she had learned. Her response: “How little there is we can do.”

I wholeheartedly disagree. There’s much to do, and fast.

• Individuals and organizations should begin contingency planning for their organizational — and personal — security. Find lawyers, find accountants, find ways to keep your organization afloat if under frivolous investigation.

• Funders must be prepared to move at the speed of events, not the speed of philanthropy — and give enough to meet the moment.

• The “democracy space” needs each other’s phone numbers. And we need the phone numbers of our friends in business, labor, activist circles, and party politics. Trust and quick communication will be essential, just as they were four years ago.

Further reading

Here’s a roundup of pieces published about the convenings by organizers, participants, and observers:

• The Washington Post (Bart Gellman): Opinion | How to defend government against an authoritarian president

• The New Republic (David Rothkopf): Here’s How President Trump Would Run Roughshod Over Our Democracy

• The Bulwark (Rosa Brooks): Democracy Will Suffer a Relatively Quiet Death. We Simulated It.

• The LA Times (Nils Gilman): Opinion: A second Trump term would be a disaster for the climate

• The Guardian (Ed Pilkington): Washington insiders simulated a second Trump presidency. Can a role-play save democracy?