Why the makers of ‘War Game’ fear we’re headed for a second Jan. 6They simulated a much-worse insurrection for a documentary. Then Trump and this wild election changed the chess board.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2024/09/27/trump-war-game-jan-6/
Actor Ralph Brown plays a Michael Flynn-like demagogue in “War Game.” (Thorsten Thielow)We are barreling toward one of the most fraught, unpredictable presidential contests in U.S. history. But beyond the question of who will win loom many more ominous unknowns: Could the certification of the election on Jan. 6, 2025, erupt into another violent attack on governmental institutions like the one four years before it? Or, perhaps, worse?
What if the challenging candidate insists to his followers that the results of the presidential election aren’t legitimate and urges them to storm the U.S. Capitol with the help of radicalized members of the D.C. National Guard? What if, having learned lessons from their failed attempt to disrupt the government on Jan. 6, 2021, his most extreme followers show up with guns at state capitols and take hostages or kidnap a governor? What if the sitting president invokes the Insurrection Act, which federalizes the National Guard, and we find ourselves at the brink of a civil war?
The documentary “War Game,” filmed two years ago, is a chilling simulation of that exact scenario, in which a bipartisan group of national security, military, political and law enforcement experts gathered in a downtown D.C. hotel conference room to role-play their response in an imagined near future with a fictional president, a fictional challenger, and a fictional extremist White Christian paramilitary organization fomenting chaos.
War Game | Official Trailer
When the nonprofit Vet Voice Foundation organized the six-hour unscripted exercise — inspired by a Washington Post op-ed from three retired generals — exactly one year after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, former president Donald Trump was still in retreat at Mar-a-Lago and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) was the party’s rising star. They brought in two documentarians, Jesse Moss (“Boys State”) and Tony Gerber (“Full Battle Rattle”), to build a set that looked like the situation room and film the action in a hotel where insurrectionists had stayed.
But as the film releases to VOD on Sept. 27, the simulation is looking eerily similar to reality. Trump, the same president impeached for “incitement of insurrection,” is now in a too-close-to-call battle with Vice President Kamala Harris. As in the scenario, an assassination attempt on one of the candidates (or two in Trump’s case) has further exposed the country’s divisions.
Like the extremist challenger in the “War Game” exercise, Trump has raised the idea of using the military for domestic law enforcement, such as to quell civil disobedience (including proposing that protesters be shot in the legs) and to conduct mass deportation of immigrants, which would require the invocation of the Insurrection Act and allow the president to mobilize federal troops and even federalize state National Guard soldiers. Project 2025, a policy platform put forth by former Trump aides, has a line saying military troops “could” be used to arrest migrants as part of the fight against drug cartels on the Southwest border. And Trump has said he’ll pardon the insurrectionists, which removes the disincentive for trying to overthrow the government.
The “War Game” situation room with (second from left to right) simulation note taker, Elizabeth Neumann; former U.S. Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera; retired Gen. Wesley Clark; former governor Steve Bullock; retired Major Gen. Linda Singh of the Maryland National Guard; former U.S. Senate staffer Gwen Camp; former CIA officer David Priess; and former FBI special agent Pete Strzok. (Thorsten Thielow)Meanwhile, the state election board for battleground state Georgia is now controlled by three avowed Trump supporters who are being sued by three Democrats for allegedly hosting an illegal meeting and passing rules that could sow chaos and uncertainty in the presidential race.
“I think the stakes that we confronted on January 6th, 2022, in this hotel ballroom in D.C., are even more so depressingly higher today than they were then,” says former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D), who plays the president in the exercise and who ran for the office himself in 2020. “When a third of the members of Congress, 171 members from 37 different states, still deny the results in the last election, I don’t think it’s hand-wringing to say that we should be prepared for [such a scenario].”
Here are the factors that make this year’s election even more dangerous than last time, according to The Washington Post’s interviews with nine people involved in the making of the film.
Trump hasn’t changed“The Republican candidate is an insurrectionist [who] is aggressively beating the drum of stolen elections and rallying the forces to potentially steal an election by any means, including violence,” says Alexander Vindman. It’s not a question of whether Trump will contest the election, but how, says the retired Army lieutenant colonel, who became the subject of national fascination when he testified about Trump’s Ukraine call in the president’s first impeachment hearing. In the “War Game” simulation he plays the role of game consultant, charged with unleashing new variables such as riots or false news reports.
As Vindman points out, Trump hasn’t said he’ll accept the results of the election. He’s baked grievances into his campaign, telling his followers that if they vote for him once, they’ll never have to vote again. And he’s implied that if he doesn’t win, something is wrong and violence might be called for. “This time around, he has cohorts around the country preparing to execute voter suppression, and if that doesn’t work, to delay the count,” says retired Wesley Clark, a retired general who acts as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in “War Game.”
He is now a felonOne new X Factor in how Trump will behave if he loses, the experts say, is his conviction on 34 counts of falsified business records in his New York hush money trial. He still has multiple cases being tried against him in other jurisdictions. “I think the fact is that Trump feels like he’s going to jail if he doesn’t win, so he’s going to do whatever he can to hang on to power,” says former senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who plays a senior adviser to the president. She believes the two federal cases against Trump — he’s charged with illegally hoarding classified documents in one and conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the other — will “evaporate” if he wins, as will any state sentence for his hush money trial.
He’s also bolstered by the conservative Supreme Court’s July decision that grants the president broad immunity for official acts and, Heitkamp believes, may use that as an excuse to use any means necessary to retake the office he still claims is rightfully his.
“If he doesn’t gain the presidency he’ll be facing trials certainly in D.C. and Georgia and probably in Florida again,” adds Peter Strzok, a former special agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who plays the head of the FBI in the exercise. “And that self-preservation goal, in my mind, is going to further erode whatever hesitation he might have in exercising moderation.”
Trump walks off after speaking at a news conference from the lobby of Trump Tower in New York the day after being found guilty in his hush money trial on May 31, 2024. He is the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)Elon Musk now controls TwitterLast election, Trump had a Twitter account that he used to tell his supporters to show up in D.C., where it would be “wild.” This time around, a Trump megadonor, Elon Musk, owns Twitter, now X. “[Musk] claims to be a free-speech absolutist, but one [who] has no compunction about heavily weighing the scales on the things that he believes in,” says Vindman. “He’s not a New York Times publisher that struggles with the idea of being nonpartisan. He’s a publisher that has an extremely aggressive bent.” And, Vindman says, if X becomes a platform that drives violent action around the election certification, Musk may do nothing to stop it.
State-level insurrectionAll experts The Post spoke to agree that — as played out in the movie — insurrectionists won’t use the same playbook twice. The danger is in targeting state capitols, particularly in contested battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Georgia. If the previous election is a guide, says Heitkamp, Trump and Republicans will not want to rely solely on legal challenges. “He’d rather take his chances in a political fight,” says Heitkamp.
Before the election, that fight has been Trump allies passing measures aimed at suppressing votes in Georgia, for example. During and after voting, election interference could take the form of intimidating election offices that are counting votes, often staffed by volunteers who are unaccustomed to dealing with conflict. In Arizona, where Biden essentially won the election by the thinnest of margins, the state became the epicenter for false claims of voter fraud, and armed GOP protesters converged at voting centers. Heitkamp believes that the GOP learned from Jan. 6 that they need to contest the ballots well before the governors sign the certification, and certainly before the certifications go to Washington, since litigation that happened after certification wasn’t successful. “[This time,] I believe that they aren’t going to let the governor of Arizona sign the ballot certification,” she says.
Vet Voice has run drills with Arizona officials on how to deal with intimidation and voter suppression and is fighting efforts in multiple states to make mail-in voting — the way many military members vote — more difficult. Vindman says Georgia’s GOP-led election board makes it the most worrisome battleground state in terms of the will of the voters being invalidated by political forces. “But [if] it’s just one out of those states, then I think it’s okay.”
But the danger isn’t just with election boards. A governor can mobilize the National Guard to stop a vote count. “What many civilians may not know about the National Guard is their mandate and responsibility is not just to the U.S. Constitution, but to their state constitution,” says Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of Vet Voice Foundation. And then there’s the question of how far Trump’s supporters will go to support him in 2024 — and whether any will seek “retribution” even if he does win, says former senator Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who plays the attorney general in the exercise. “I’m not optimistic that we’re going to escape violence,” he says.
An unprecedented opponent in Kamala HarrisIt was Trump’s false “birther” claims about former president Barack Obama that started his political career, and racial resentment among Whites that grew out of Obama’s presidency partly fueled his 2016 victory. How will those factions react if Harris wins?
“Donald Trump did not invent paramilitary organizations,” says Heitkamp, drawing a distinction between “true believers,” who really did think storming the Capitol was a patriotic act to stop a stolen election, and “the people who have waited a long time to have a seat at the table.” By that, she means the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys. “These are serious people, and Trump refused to call them off [on Jan. 6] because they were his militia,” says Heitkamp. “Are they more motivated, given that Trump would be defeated by a woman of Asian African descent? I don’t know. But I’d ask.”
Radicalization in the ranksA big motivation of “War Game” was to alert Americans and the government to the growth of extremism in the ranks of the U.S. military and how out of control that could get with even just a few heavily armed outliers.
The threat is “very real,” says Strzok, that if Harris wins, some members of the military could believe she stole the election and that they need to band together with paramilitary groups to take down an illegitimate president. “I’m worried about stochastic terrorism,” he says. “It’s not 1,500 descending on the Capitol, but 20 at this state capitol and ten at that state capitol and five at this politician’s house. They can do something that wouldn’t be the same size as Jan. 6, but would still be extraordinarily devastating.”
Clark, though, believes the idea that members of the military would rise up is overblown. “In my experience, there’s a lot of bulls--- talk that goes on [regarding] troops,” he says. “And yet, when you say, ‘Saddle up, let’s go.’ They go. And very few don’t.”
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