This May and June, leaders from Washington’s policy, political, legal, and national security communities got together to imagine what for many of us remains almost unthinkable: how the United States might change in the wake of a Donald Trump victory in November. The centerpiece of the effort, known as the Democracy Futures Project, was a series of five nonpartisan simulation exercises that envisioned different ways Trump and his administration might dismantle key elements of our democracy.
If there was one core conclusion from the simulations, which brought together nearly 200 experts, it was this: We had better do everything in our power to get out the vote for Kamala Harris and the Democrats in November, because there is currently no effective Plan B on the horizon if Trump returns to the White House.
The Democracy Futures Project exercises were hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice and co-led by Rosa Brooks, journalist Barton Gellman, historian Nils Gilman, and attorney Miriam Rosenbaum. I was an active participant throughout the project. The views expressed in this article are solely my own and do not represent those of the Brennan Center or the project’s individual organizers. The exercises also included former senior officials from the Trump, Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations; former senators, congresspeople, retired generals, and senior state and local officials from both parties; along with journalists and civil society leaders.
Each role-play exercise consisted of several rounds, in which the players representing the Trump team would begin by announcing their goals and the steps they intended to take to implement those goals—from rounding up millions of undocumented citizens to imprisoning their political enemies, from ordering active-duty military troops into American cities to replacing all civil servants who refused to follow their orders. Following those initial moves, players representing the pro-democracy “opposition” would respond, trying to stop or influence Trump’s efforts by combating them in the courts or the media, or through state or local legislation. Players were asked to respond as they believed those in their roles would behave in real life.
The experience wasn’t reassuring. In none of the simulations was the pro-democracy opposition able to successfully reverse the overall thrust of the Trump team’s efforts, and on the whole, democratic norms and institutions rapidly disintegrated. Defenders of democracy had some isolated successes in the courts, Congress, or at the state level, and in some cases Team Trump had to settle for less ambitious versions of their initial plans. Market reactions and decisions by foreign actors (both allies and adversaries) had some impact on the actions of the new administration. But in each exercise, the basic rights and prerogatives of Americans were systematically stripped away, and the institutions of the U.S. government gradually ceased to resemble what they have been in the past.
Indeed, one of the more disturbing conclusions of these political gaming exercises was that it is very hard to stop a ruthless president committed to stripping away people’s basic freedoms, especially if he or she is abetted by a compliant Supreme Court or a supine Congress. By installing loyalists throughout the government, firing or marginalizing those who might resist change, taking advantage of the immunity granted by the Supreme Court, and acting through executive orders and presidential emergency powers, a president not bound by norms or law can launch a concerted assault on the rule of law in this country—and such an assault would be very difficult for even a dedicated, motivated opposition to counter.
Trump has learned since his defeat in 2020. In his first term, he hadn’t expected to win; he knew little about how to move the levers of executive power, and he initially stocked his Cabinet with institutionalists who pushed back against his worst instincts. This time, Trump would enter office with a pre-vetted team of sycophants and a detailed blueprint for change.
Take Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation–led playbook for a right-wing president “to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” It includes a plan, known as Schedule F, to fire essentially all top civil servants who might prioritize loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to Trump. (The efforts of such civil servants during Trump’s first administration were the focus of my 2022 book, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation.) Project 2025’s other authoritarian plans range from better structuring executive orders to avoid legal challenges to being more thorough in efforts to rig or undermine election results. (Trump himself last week assured America’s “beautiful Christians” that if he regains the White House in November, everything “will be fixed … you won’t have to vote anymore.”) No one should imagine Trump won’t make full use of the work of Project 2025; at least 140 people who worked in his administration were involved in the effort, according to CNN, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, supports some of its most extreme ideas.
In the Democracy Futures Project exercises, Trump’s ambitions were aided by the fragmented nature of the opposition. Most Americans reject autocracy. But Democrats, independents, and Republicans who respect the Constitution are neither organized to combat a ruthless Trumpian power play nor inclined by temperament to fight fire with fire. In the simulations, Team Trump routinely went scorched-earth, while the pro-democracy opposition issued press releases, organized peace concerts, and fretted about the need for consensus and inclusivity.
Simulation exercises are art, not science. They lay out possible futures, but they don’t predict the future, and some might wonder if pro-democracy actors would truly be so ineffective when confronting non-hypothetical threats. Unfortunately, the past suggests the exercises unfolded all too realistically. Consider the way the GOP Senate jammed through Republican nominees for the Supreme Court under Trump, while using what they characterized as respect for tradition to block Democratic judicial nominees. Consider the way institutionalists in the Justice Department hesitated and delayed before prosecuting crimes committed by Trump or his high-level associates—even though, as president, Trump himself shamelessly sought to use the Justice Department to undermine the 2020 election results and block investigations into his Russia ties and his business abuses (all actions the Supreme Court recently concluded are “official” and protected by immunity).
More recently, we have had another object lesson in the collective-action problems faced by Democrats and their pro-democracy allies. In the weeks following Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump, we saw game theory come to life: While it was clear that the vast majority of Democratic voters and party leaders wanted Biden to drop out, it was equally clear few had the guts to say so publicly. Indeed, it’s now apparent that Biden administration and campaign insiders had been privately concerned for months about the president’s ability to serve out a second term or conduct a successful reelection campaign. But they remained silent until a catalytic event too dramatic to ignore forced the issue into the open.
Even after that, careerism, cowardice, and indecision paralyzed party leaders for weeks. Meanwhile, the media was dominated by negative stories about Democratic Party dysfunction, internal disputes, a badly weakened candidate, and cratering voter morale. Although calls for Biden’s withdrawal eventually began to dribble out, the agony was prolonged. In the end, it took Representative Nancy Pelosi—who, at 84 and no longer speaker of the House, had no direct stake in hanging onto power—to coax and maneuver enough people into urging Biden to withdraw, for the sake of the country and the party.
There could hardly be a starker illustration of how inertia, fear, self-interest, tradition, and sentiment can stall action essential to preserving our system of government. The stakes were massive: If Biden hadn’t stepped down, the Democrats would be facing near-certain loss in November and the scenarios we gamed out in the Democracy Futures Project would almost certainly come to pass.
Fortunately, in the end Biden did the right thing, and with Vice President Kamala Harris now the presumptive Democratic nominee, there is new energy and creativity driving the collective action of Democrats and all those opposed to a Trump win, and—maybe—we’re starting to learn from our brush with disaster. Technologies such as Zoom are being used to mobilize massive numbers of people and bring in a flood of new donations. Early polling results suggest that core groups necessary to winning in November—voters of color, women voters, young voters—are enthusiastically joining the movement to elect Harris as president.
But the polls remain close, and with democracy truly on the ballot, this is no time for complacency or business as usual. Trump will stop at nothing to win, and we’ve seen him seek to disrupt and ignore elections in the past. Foreign enemies, like Vladimir Putin, have a huge stake in a Trump victory, and we know they are already meddling in the election. Meanwhile, the media and members of the GOP are busy normalizing the abnormal.
The Democracy Future Project’s exercises can’t tell us whether the descent into authoritarianism will be fast or slow if Trump wins. Most likely, it will involve a combination of highly visible steps and subtler, possibly even more dangerous changes far from view. But the exercises make it clear that should Trump win in November, there is every reason to expect the worst. And that’s why there is also every reason to prepare for the worst case. If those who care about democracy start coordinating now to shore up democracy’s defenses, we’ll have a fighting chance of slowing or preventing Trump’s most egregious plans should he regain the White House.
And while we start planning for this dark future, at the same time we need to focus intensively on winning this election. We have a new candidate who is pulling no punches, and within the last week we have seen a surge in momentum, creativity, leadership, and purpose. We must build on that. Because given the politically biased and corrupt Supreme Court, the commitment of MAGA Republicans on the Hill to political hackery, and the grim determination of Trump and his sycophantic allies to act on his repeated autocratic threats, our best chance—and possibly our last chance—to preserve our democracy will be in November.
