This article first appeared in the Washington Post.
It is late afternoon on Inauguration Day 2025. Protesters fill the downtowns of American cities, enraging the newly sworn president. Send in the military, he demands. Invoke the Insurrection Act. Federalize the National Guard in all 50 states. Tell the troops to use all the force they need to clear the streets.
So began one of five tabletop exercises I co-led in May and June, along with former Defense Department official Rosa Brooks and historian Nils Gilman. We based the starting scenarios on the election of former president Donald Trump to a second term, and we asked participants playing the president, all of them Republicans or former Republicans, to base their gameplay on Trump’s publicly stated promises.
As a nonpartisan think tank, my employer, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, takes no position on how Americans should cast their votes. Nor do we predict who will win in November. Some of my colleagues are doing scenario planning for a Democratic victory, too.
The role-playing exercises were designed to test how well checks and balances, broadly understood, might restrain a president from abusing his power. The results were not encouraging: The games demonstrated repeatedly that an authoritarian in control of the executive branch, with little concern for legal limits, holds a structural advantage over any lawful effort to restrain him.
But they point to preparations that could be undertaken now to improve the odds for democracy and the rule of law — and some existing guardrails that might not be widely understood.
Participants in our exercises, 175 in all, included Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, independents and centrists. Many had held senior positions under Trump or a previous president. Among them were former Cabinet secretaries, former governors and state attorneys general, former members of the House and Senate, a retired ambassador, retired flag and general officers, a retired federal appellate judge, labor leaders, faith leaders, grass-roots organizers, members of the Brennan Center staff and C-suite executives.
We gathered twice by videoconference and three times in a hotel conference room outside Washington for six-hour sessions around a large U-shaped table. About 35 players per game were assigned to the Red, Blue or Nonaligned teams. (Those colors do not signify political parties — they are the conventional ones used in government tabletop exercises.) The players announced their moves and countermoves, negotiated, interrupted one another and occasionally shouted over our unflappable controller, Ed McGrady, an experienced game architect.
The starting scenarios did not test policy questions within the ordinary bounds of democratic debate: taxes, regulation, climate change. We focused instead on threats to democracy itself and the institutions that uphold it, such as misuse of regulatory or prosecutorial powers to punish political foes.
None of the exercises left us sanguine. Participants were almost uniformly sobered by the paucity of effective constraints on abuse of power. The exercises showed emphatically that Trump’s authoritarian promises, with implementing details in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, pose a profound threat to constitutional government. Defenders of democracy, our participants assessed, must do more than they are doing now to prepare. The exercises suggest that it would not be possible to block every abuse, but there are tools available to deflect, delay and diminish the damage.
Our exercises included a scenario that tried to predict what might happen on Inauguration Day next year. When the Red commander in chief invoked the Insurrection Act, which enables a president to deploy military forces domestically to suppress rebellion, among other things, Blue players filed a long-shot challenge in court. The judge, who was designated as nonaligned, dismissed their complaint. Courts have interpreted the language of the act to give the president exclusive authority to determine when to use the power it grants, which is what makes it so dangerous.
The Blue House of Representatives moved to cut off federal funds for any domestic troop deployments. The Red attorney general, played by Peter Keisler, who held that position on an acting basis under President George W. Bush, found a way to use existing budget authority.
The Blue governor, played by New Jersey’s former Republican governor Christine Todd Whitman, tried to prevent the federal call-up of her state Guard. First, she deployed it under her own authority. Then she urged the state adjutant general, played by retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Enyart, to disobey the president’s order. (If he did so in real life, he would be relieved of command and court-martialed.)
Unexpectedly, the Red governor, played by a retired GOP state legislator, also objected. He wanted to keep his Guard soldiers at home in case of state emergency. And activating the troops would pull them from essential jobs such as police officers, firefighters and paramedics.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, played by retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, began asking questions.
What happened next was not the “deep state” conspiracy of right-wing imaginings. Nobody in our exercise took any step to undermine civilian control of the military or disregard an order from the commander in chief.
And yet, the chairman paused. All officers swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president personally. The Uniform Code of Military Justice requires them, under penalty of prosecution, to disobey an unlawful order. And senior military leaders promise under oath, at Senate confirmation hearings, to give their unvarnished advice.
In that spirit, the chairman asked the president to define the mission more clearly. Under exceptional authorities, the military could “assist” state and local law enforcement, he said, but Blue governors and mayors were denying any need for federal assistance.
What rules of engagement did the president have in mind for use of force on Americans exercising First Amendment rights? The judge advocate general, the chairman said, would have to review the rules for compliance with military law.
Fed up, the president, played by a former GOP party leader, fired the chairman. Then another senior general, played by a retired four-star, pointed out that mobilizing every state’s National Guard would consume about half of all forces designated for foreign contingencies. Adversaries might seize the opportunity to do something dangerous.
The president waved that point away, demanding that the general “restore law and order” in the cities and “defend the country against antifa.” The general tried to help him translate that language into an executable military order. The president cut in: “You’re fired, too.”
There were many more moves and countermoves around the room. Efforts to restrain the president’s worst impulses finally dissuaded him from a full, national call-up of the Guard. The defense secretary drafted orders that were not illegal on their face. The generals saluted.
Nothing came close to stopping the president from crushing demonstrations by force, but military leaders warded off talk of potentially lethal measures. (During protests outside the White House in 2020, according to former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, Trump asked, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”) When the soldiers arrived in our exercise, grass-roots organizers kept the protests peaceful. Faith leaders in clerical garb positioned themselves as shields. Pure good fortune warded off serious violence when the two sides met. Our game controller rolled a pair of 20-sided dice to represent unknown odds. Bloodshed, according to the dice, was largely averted. As any gambler knows, the next roll could have brought another outcome entirely.
In two of our five games, Red overwhelmed Blue with an “everything, everywhere” battle plan on many fronts at once.
One Red administration featured the firing of inspectors general, senior federal workers, special counsel Jack Smith and several generals. The IRS formed a task force to revoke the tax-exempt status of universities and think tanks that “spread misinformation” about the 2020 election. The Education Department mandated that states withhold federal funding from schools that taught “critical race theory.”The Labor Department prepared rules to ban diversity, equity and inclusion policies in public companies. The FBI and Justice Department opened criminal investigations of Joe Biden, his family and members of the former House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. All “Jan. 6 patriots” secured pardons. The Justice Department held that the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional, and the president refused to spend appropriated funds for programs he disliked.
In that game, Blue and its allies struggled to respond. Career prosecutors who pushed back against spurious criminal charges, for example, were fired or chose to resign. The Red attorney general found willing replacements.
In another game, which focused on Red’s mass expulsion of migrants, including American-born children of undocumented parents, Blue expended the bulk of its energy on lawsuits that moved too slowly to match the pace of events on the ground.
Red’s deportation efforts did lead to interesting power struggles across federal, state and local jurisdictions. Our players, despite real-world experience in their roles, encountered novel questions that they had not considered before: What if U.S. marshals started rounding up people who could not prove their legal status on the spot? Could Blue city police officers make them stop? What if an Immigration and Customs Enforcement task force showed up at a Blue state sanctuary for undocumented immigrants? What if a Red governor, allied with the president, tried to deploy his National Guard across the neighboring Blue state line?
Our players had no immediate answers. Their counterparts in real life will have legal advisers to turn to, but they would be well advised to probe the limits of their authority in advance.
Past presidents of both parties have taken steps we would regard as authoritarian today. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson used the FBI to spy on political opponents. Richard M. Nixon tested laws in his war with the federal bureaucracy. Several presidents contemplated disobeying court orders. What is new today is the potential for many abuses of this sort to happen in one term.
Our participants assessed that the guardrails that held Trump back in his first term would likely not suffice in a second. His party has been largely purged of people willing to oppose him openly. The president would have a cadre of loyalists who know this time, as one of our players said, “where the door handles are.” He would appoint few, if any, establishment figures like the ones who bottled up some of his authoritarian ideas in 2017. Resignation threats, which at the Justice Department partly deterred Trump in January 2021, seem less likely to do so again. Federal courts, increasingly partisan, are friendlier terrain for him now.
Even so, our exercises did not suggest that any authoritarian would command a uniformly obedient federal workforce. No president does. No matter how many career civil servants he succeeded in firing, he would be unlikely to find enough men and women who are both loyal and equipped by experience to fill the thousands of positions required to carry out his plans.
There is no official leader of the opposition in American politics, but the pro-democracy coalition cannot afford to splinter. In 2017, with no advance warning, opposition to Trump’s authoritarian policies coalesced quickly. If, ahead of 2025, rule-of-law advocates take time to prepare, the coalition could work even more closely for the common defense.
Many of our players, in debriefings, observed that the pro-democracy actors lack the resources to match the gravity of their mission. One good use of resources would be to help defenders of democracy make ready to defend themselves. It might not be possible to stop Trump from targeting his many enemies. But now is a good time to recruit networks of lawyers, accountants, crisis communications teams, and experts in digital and physical security to come to their aid.
Governors, mayors and state attorneys general may have more power than they know to defend against an authoritarian president. Friends of the rule of law should help them explore the fine points of their authority in advance. Blue states can pass laws and write regulations to restore protections that the federal government removes. They can bring civil suits and criminal prosecutions against unlawful acts undertaken in the president’s name.
To inoculate against the human instinct to fold under pressure, friends of constitutional government should seek “pre-commitments” from potential allies to take specific, lawful actions if certain red lines are crossed. When the time comes, individuals, organizations and corporate executives can be encouraged to draw upon the courage of convictions they expressed in advance.
Civil servants and other guardians of the public interest should carry on with their essential work. Friends of constitutional government should counsel them against resigning, stiffen their resolve to follow lawful procedures, educate them on whistleblower channels and offer legal support against retaliation.
Trump’s biggest “center of gravity,” his essential source of strength, is public opinion — including those well beyond his strongest supporters. Many of our participants agreed that public sentiment can set boundaries on abuse of power. But the democracy coalition will need a communications plan far more extensive than anything it has organized in the past.
Defenders of democracy can deter the president’s enablers from breaking the law by holding them at risk of legal action, loss of future employment and professional sanctions. And yet many participants said in debriefings that the Blue teams leaned too heavily on lawsuits. Courts may help restrain abuses of power, as they did in Trump’s first term, but other tools may prove more potent.
The most pressing legal question raised in our games was what to do if an authoritarian president defied a court order. Nobody had a good answer, but the rule of law demands one.
Democratic self-defense may rest, in the end, on the demonstrated will of the American people — expressed, if necessary, in persistent, large-scale protest — to reject authoritarian rule. Agents provocateurs and deepfake videos will attempt to discredit orderly and lawful expressions of dissent, and peaceful protest might be met with authoritarian violence. Americans have overcome that before and might have to again.
It will not be a roll of the dice, as it was in the games, that decides the ultimate outcome. Friends of our constitutional republic may need to defend it implacably, by every lawful means.
