How bad is it? This is very bad, and we are not nearly ready for what’s coming our way. In May and June 2024, I helped lead the Democracy Futures Project, a series of role-play simulation exercises hosted by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. The exercises were designed to better understand how a second Trump administration might play out—and which strategies might offer hope of countering the autocratic threats we knew were likely to come our way.

The DFP simulations involved almost 200 “players,” many of them with senior-level experience in past presidential administrations, including Trump’s first administration, along with former members of Congress, retired senior military officials, and civil society leaders from faith groups, nonprofits, universities, and grassroots organizations. The simulations began by assuming Trump had just been sworn in and proceeded from there.

Participants were assigned roles that drew on their prior experience (former senators played senators, retired four-star generals played four-star generals, and so on). Some were assigned to play members of the incoming Trump administration, others to represent those likely to be in opposition, from Democratic political leaders to civil rights groups. In the simulations, Trump announced his agenda and initial actions (we asked players to draw solely from actions Trump himself has indicated he supports), and players took turns responding to one another as the “games” unfolded. “War-gaming” exercises like these can help test assumptions, forcing participants to respond to dynamic, changing conditions in real time.

The results were sobering—many strategies relied upon by pro-democracy actors proved largely ineffective in countering moves by the Trump players. Here are a few of the lessons that emerged.

First, we should not imagine that litigation will be an effective tool for stopping egregious Trump administration actions. In recent decades, both political parties have cheerfully colluded in the steady expansion of executive power. The Insurrection Act and similar legislation grants the president extraordinary discretionary powers to declare emergencies. These would likely allow Trump to bypass the checks and balances that would normally constrain potentially norm-shattering executive actions, such as the possible deployment of active-duty military forces to the shutting down of protests in U.S. cities.

Litigation is........

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