The Democracy Futures Project

In May and June 2024, the Brennan Center organized five nonpartisan tabletop exercises premised on an authoritarian candidate winning the presidency to test the resilience of democratic institutions. The antidemocratic executive actions explored in the scenarios were based on former President Donald Trump’s public statements about his plans for a potential second term in office.  

We do not predict whether Trump will win the November election, and we take no position on how Americans should cast their votes. What we have done is simulated how authoritarian elements of Trump’s agenda, if he is elected, might play out against lawful efforts to check abuses of power.

The 175 participants across five exercises were Republicans, Democrats, and independents; liberals, conservatives, and centrists. They included veterans of the first Trump administration and previous administrations of both parties.  

Among them were former governors, former cabinet members, former state attorneys general, former members of the House and Senate, retired flag and general officers, labor leaders, faith leaders, grassroots activists, members of the Brennan Center staff, and C-suite business executives. In the exercises, they represented cabinet secretaries, executive agency chiefs, law enforcement officers, the military chain of command, Congress, the judiciary, state and local governments, news media, and elements of civil society.  

These scenarios were overseen by Barton Gellman, senior adviser at the Brennan Center, along with Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman. Gellman’s focus is on building safeguards against threats to democracy in the 2024 election and in the presidential administration to come in 2025.

Gellman came to the Brennan Center from the Atlantic, where he was an award-winning staff writer. He is the author most recently of Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State and the best-selling Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. He has previously served as senior fellow at the Century Foundation, lecturer at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and visiting research collaborator at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Before joining the Atlantic, Gellman spent 21 years at the Washington Post, where he served tours as a legal, diplomatic, military, and Middle East correspondent.

Gellman anchored the team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden. He was previously awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series on Vice President Dick Cheney. He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coverage of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Other professional honors include two George Polk Awards, two Overseas Press Club Awards, two Emmy Awards for a PBS Frontline documentary, Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.