A few months ago, through work at my day job, I was asked to participate in a series of table top exercises hosted by the Brennan Center that were designed to simulate the first year of a Donald Trump presidency.
Before I go any further I must state in the most unequivocal terms possible that the scenarios presented by the game organizers were based on extremely caricaturized visions of Republicans, not just Trump, and how they would govern. Because of that cartoonish vision I will not be referring to Trump by name as President in this post moving forward. I have never met Donald Trump. I have been simultaneously proud and disgusted by him at times. He has said some incredibly bone headed things that drive me up the wall, which means he may have earned the depiction the game organizers pinned on him. But I am not ready to surrender the notion that there are still some very serious minded Republicans surrounding him and others who also take their elected jobs seriously. So for the sake of this post, instead of referring to the President by name, I will simply treat that role as a generic authoritarian who somehow gets elected.
The organizers have held the participants under an embargo which has prevented the latter from discussing the exercises which lifted today. You can read an op-ed in the Washington Post from their perspective here. It mentions me, although not by name, because I am the retired GOP State Legislator who played the role of Republican Governor and pushed back on the President’s desire to federalize the National Guard. More on that in a minute.
As a participant, I played the role of Red State Governor in two of the exercises and the part of Red Congress in a third.
At the outset we were given the direction to, “win the game.” This allowed me to play the game with a different set of motives from the people who played parts in the President’s administration. My thought process was that as someone who had taken an oath to the Constitution, had to stand for reelection, or protect my ambition to seek higher office, winning was defined at least in part by what was best for me. Acting as a lemming and jumping of the proverbial cliff and committing political suicide isn’t something a lot of State Governors I have met would do recklessly.
In each of our scenarios, Republicans held a 51 seat majority in the Senate and were the minority in the House. I was at a separate gathering just weeks before the exercises took place where I got to hear U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, give an impassioned argument for preserving the Senate Filibuster Rule at all costs. Because she was recently reelected to a six year term that would not end until 2028, I felt confident that she and at least two other GOP colleagues would resist the call to end the filibuster.
So in the game when I played Red Congress, I informed the President that there were not enough votes to end the rule. Their reaction? To dox the Senators who refused. I am not aware of a single instance where doxing someone was effective at getting them to change their stance. But it was just one example of how outlandish some of the game conditions were. With Congress split between Democrat and Republican control there was little I could do to impact the game one way or another. At one point I had gotten buy in from Blue Congress on a comprehensive immigration reform package that they simply walked away from after some of their side’s activists wanted more. That part felt very real.
By the third game, I had become increasingly concerned about what the work product would be from these simulations. What would they say was the result? How would they portray the results to the public? Would any Republicans get a fair shake at all?
The final game took place on a Monday and we received the directives for that game on Sunday evening. The President’s very first initiative would be to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to federalize the National Guard and use them for civil law enforcement duties.
I cannot think of a single Republican Governor who would simply go along with allowing their Guard Troops, who on the whole are not trained for civil law enforcement, to be used in this manner. Again, you must account for the personal responsibilities of a Governor and their future ambitions. So with my concern about the work product that would come from these games in mind, I set about trying to show how federalism could stem the flow of authoritarianism under the right circumstances, hoping that I could show a ray of hope in the darkness of the games.
Two other factors that must be considered here are:
- How Governors are protective of their own states, resources, and authority.
- If something went wrong and American soldiers ended up killing other Americans, how would that destabilize the national mood? Governors would pay the political price for this when POTUS will be gone in four years.
One more note of how protective Governors are with their National Guard; earlier this year the Biden Administration pitched the idea of moving guard units under the full time command of the Space Force. Forty-Eight State Governors, (and 5 more from US Territories) signed a joint letter protesting the proposal. The other two were Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, who sent their own and individual letters in protest.
All 50 state Governors, singing in one voice. In this age of hyper partisanship and tribalism, why? Well, in their own words, “This legislation disregards gubernatorial authorities regarding the National Guard and undermines over 100 years of precedent as well as national security and military readiness… It is imperative that Governors retain the authority laid out in United States Code (U.S.C.) Title 32, Section 104. LP480 undercuts this critical authority by allowing a transfer of covered space units from the National Guard to the United States Space Force without abiding by Title 32 or Title 10. Specifically, section 18238 of Title 10 states that there should be no removal or withdrawal of a unit of the Air National Guard without consultation and approval from Governors.” Emphasis mine.
Authority. Authority. Authority.
So with all of that in mind I met with the Blue State Governor before the game even started to lay out my plan. I then went to the Red Congress and asked them to see if they could work a deal with Blue Congress to get a crime bill in place that would preserve civil law enforcement authority in the states, while providing additional funding for additional officers, training, and equipment.
Blue Congress agreed on one condition; POTUS may not invoke the Insurrection Act.
All of POTUS’s military advisors told him to take the deal. One went so far as to say that he could always invoke the Insurrection Act later if he felt it was necessary. At this point I interjected with something along the lines of, “Mr. President, law enforcement is a state function and I would ask that you allow me to do my job. The Legislation you have before you can cement your legacy as one of the most effective President’s in history. You give us the tools we need to do what you want us to do at the same time in your first week in office you beat down the Democrats’ defund the police efforts. You should consider how big this win is.”
For the briefest of moments I could see in POTUS’s eyes we had painted him into a box. There is no realistic world where POTUS doesn’t take that deal. He hesitated ever so briefly, and said no. He was moving forward with his plan. In real politics, strongmen make enemies looking to take them down rather than do what they want. POTUS was creating that environment.
Remember, recent precedent has shown that the Governors will unite in a bipartisan manner when their own authority is under attack by the Federal Government. In order for any Governor to go along with sending their National Guard without being federalized, the conditions would have to be historically bad. We are talking way worse than the Rodney King riots.
But that wasn’t our scenario at all.
In one of our scenarios Taylor Swift decided to hold protest/pro-democracy concerts. POTUS reacted by first deputizing, as federal agents, the Proud Boys, and then sending them to quash the protest. Violence ensued and a role of the dice showed roughly 20 people died.
Let’s just completely set aside how ludicrous the notion is that any POTUS would deputize the Proud Boys. I mean… just damn. I will only say it is an example of how these very seriously minded, highly educated organizers have arrived at a place of irrational fear of what may happen. But this was the scenario they presented us with that would be used by POTUS to turn 21 year old part time soldiers into police officers overnight.
By lunch time the organizers pulled me aside to question my game play. They indicated that they thought there would be more compliance from Governors with the President’s agenda. As I have laid it out here, I explained to them why between POTUS and me, I was the one being the most realistic. Guardsmen are usually trained in combat support roles. My father-in-law, who retired as a member of the Florida National Guard, was in an air defense artillery unit as an example. There are only a handful of Military Police units. And anytime the Guard is called up, those soldiers leave their day jobs as firemen, paramedics, etc. There is an enormous cost to local communities whenever it is needed, so it better be needed.
As lunch was wrapping up, the person playing POTUS approached me to encourage me to be more compliant. He mentioned Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Greg Abbott who would fall in line. I have a mutual friend of Governor Sanders, and from what I can ascertain I honestly don’t think she would voluntarily send her National Guard to another state to be used as civil law enforcement unless it was way worse. I would like to believe that she would be one of the voices of reason that would be trying to talk POTUS out of it. I don’t know for sure if that would be the case or not, but 20 people dying at a Taylor Swift concert with no other significant outbreaks of violence lend me to believe I was on the right track.
After lunch and once the game resumed, POTUS addressed me as Governor Abbott and asked that I voluntarily send my guard troops to California to quash civil protests. As Governor Abbott, I reminded POTUS that Texas is under a foreign invasion and that my troops were already deployed to the southern border, so I refused his request. The administration responded by attempting to bring trumped up federal child molestation charges against Governor Abbott before the game master intervened and would not allow them to do it.
Yep. I was the one who wasn’t playing it realistically. /sarcasm
After the game concluded the administration said that the governors really thwarted their plans and it became discouraging to the whole effort. I have not seen that mentioned in the post event materials published by the Brennan Center. Maybe they just thought of all the scenarios we were faced with I didn’t play it the way they thought it would go and therefore it wasn’t worth mentioning. But I believe they missed an opportunity to really highlight the strength of shared power and authority in the federalism model.
At the very end, the organizers asked everyone if they thought Trump would comply with a court order he disagreed with unless is came from the Supreme Court. None of us, including me, thought that he would. But for me it wasn’t about Trump specifically. I am old enough to remember how the Supreme Court ruled against Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan and he did it anyway.
On June 18th, as I was heading home from the work of the simulations, I posted this on Facebook:
Heading home from DC and the thing I am struck with most from this particular visit is just how disconnected the people who are of this place are with the viewpoint of the rest of us.
I cannot say what I have been up to for the past several days just yet, the org I have been working with wants to publish a report on their work first. After they do I will being writing about the experience at Peach Pundit.
But I will say this much right now: I am more in love with our big, beautiful, system of federalism now more than ever. But I am dismayed at how many people here have completely lost faith in it. Stay tuned for more at the appropriate time.
My personal Facebook post
I have been saying for a while how both sides contribute to the erosion of public confidence in our institutions. I can see how these exercises, which relied on incredible scenarios and cartoonish representations of Republicans in office, have the potential to contribute to that erosion of faith in not only federalism, but other institutions as well.
Governors should, and I believe would, take every action at their disposal to preserve civil law enforcement responsibilities within the states without federal interference. Yet, that adherence and loyalty to federalism seemed to be lost on the organizers and in its place was some sort of belief that all Republicans would be motivated to simply go along with whatever the President wanted.
But the very thing that took them by surprise when Bart Gellman wrote, “Unexpectedly, the Red governor, played by a retired GOP state legislator, also objected,” is the very thing that would be able to save us from any authoritarian President, whether their name is Trump, Biden, or Harris.
