Democracy Will Suffer a Relatively Quiet Death. We Simulated It.
Democracy Will Suffer a Relatively Quiet Death. We Simulated It.
We also found steps we can take now to save it.
PICTURE THIS: It’s March 2025, and Donald Trump is back in the White House. Despite the burst of euphoria that followed Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, Trump managed to eke out a narrow Electoral College victory.
The presidential transition was peaceful. Kamala Harris conceded defeat, Biden vacated the White House, and although there were protests around the country and sporadic clashes between protesters and counterprotesters, the nation hasn’t descended into chaos or civil war. On television, the talking heads are having a good laugh: All that talk about existential threats to democracy looks so silly in hindsight! The core institutions of American democracy are still there, same as ever.
At least, that’s how it looks from the outside. But on the inside, the norms and institutions that constitute our democracy are crumbling.
THIS PAST MAY AND JUNE, I co-led the Democracy Futures Project with journalist Barton Gellman, historian Nils Gilman, and attorney Miriam Rosenbaum. With the Brennan Center for Justice as our host, the Democracy Futures Project organized five large-scale, nonpartisan simulation exercises, two on Zoom and three in person. We were looking for insights into what might happen if a second Trump administration follows through on Trump’s autocratic threats.
Participants in these tabletop exercises included former senior officials from President Trump’s first administration, along with former senators and members of Congress from both parties, senior state officials, retired generals, heads of major nonprofits, business leaders, journalists, faith leaders, union leaders, and grassroots activists from both right and left.
In one exercise, we posited a narrow Trump win and a GOP-controlled Congress; in the others, we began with a closely divided Congress. In two of the exercises, we allowed role players to explore potential moves in any arena, while in the remaining three, we asked them to focus on narrower issue areas: immigration, potential domestic use of the military, and how Trump might use federal regulatory, investigative, and prosecutorial powers. We did not explore how ordinary policy decisions might unfold (abortion, taxes, climate policy, etc.). We focused only on potential actions that posed threats to core norms of democratic accountability and the rule of law, and asked our role players to be guided in their moves by Trump’s own stated plans. (Full disclosure: A handful of people associated with editing, publishing, and writing for The Bulwark participated in various capacities.)
The exercises produced some “good news”: None of the simulations devolved into mass violence or civil conflict, and Team Trump found it difficult to fully execute its most ambitious plans. For instance, in one of our exercises, Trump’s efforts to detain millions of undocumented migrants floundered; the money and infrastructure for such a massive operation proved too challenging. In another, red state governors joined blue state governors in resisting efforts to federalize their national guard units and send them to quell anti-Trump protests in major U.S. cities. In several exercises, government employees raised repeated questions about logistics, budgets, and authorities, slowing and mitigating some of Team Trump’s most egregious actions.
Overall, the simulations suggested that we should worry a little less about the extremes, such as mass detentions, large-scale organized political violence, or the mass-scale domestic deployment of active-duty military forces to suppress lawful protests. But our exercises also suggested that if Trump’s second administration proves more careful and competent than his first, most Americans may simply remain unaware—or aware but passive—as a quiet autocratic revolution takes place.
Imagine, for instance, something like this in spring 2025:
On the surface, America seems stable. For nearly all Americans, life continues as usual. But at the Pentagon, top generals are being forced out for objecting to Trump’s cozy relationship with Russia and his plans to use active-duty troops to round up migrants. At the CIA, the Justice Department, and other agencies, civil servants are being reassigned or fired for raising concerns about the politicization of intelligence and the pressure to launch ideologically motivated investigations.
High-profile nonprofit groups are undergoing IRS audits, forcing their senior staff to spend most of their time huddled with accountants and lawyers. More university presidents have resigned in the face of investigations, audits, and threats to yank federal funding over curricula and the actions of student protests. Meanwhile, a number of high-profile journalists are the targets of leak investigations. The owners of several major media outlets are under investigation for specious criminal tax code violations, and the FCC is considering revoking the broadcast licenses of a dozen television stations. Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and retired Gen. Mark Milley are under investigation for allegedly mishandling classified materials.
The nation’s streets are largely peaceful. But around the country, numerous civil servants, reporters, teachers, librarians, election officials, and other community leaders are being doxxed and threatened.
You can imagine how this unfolds. Most people will see the writing on the wall: Speak out, and life becomes unpleasant. Your address and children’s names will be posted on social media. You’ll get a nasty letter from the IRS. Perhaps your brother’s undocumented girlfriend will go to work one day and never come home, and you won’t know if she’s been detained or deported. Your pregnant niece might be stopped by police as she drives from Texas to New Mexico, and grilled about whether she’s heading to an abortion clinic. Maybe the FBI and Homeland Security will use undercover agents—or even government surveillance capabilities—to spy on organizations from school boards to church groups, in search of “illegals,” “Christian-hating communists,” the “woke,” and other “vermin.”
The chilling effect on our politics would be intense. Ordinary citizens would self-censor. Many federal, state, and local leaders, rightly worried about the effects on themselves and their families, will quietly step down from their roles.
Far from being a liberal projection of Trump-era dystopia, this kind of scenario was repeatedly highlighted as a bleak potential future by the former Trump officials and other Republicans who took part in our simulations. This is how American democracy will most likely end: not with a bang, but a whimper.
WELL-DESIGNED SIMULATIONS have a way of puncturing wishful thinking. Many tactics favored by defenders of democracy didn’t work in our simulations. Litigation proved largely ineffective as a restraint on Trump: It’s slow, the courts have been packed with sympathetic judges, and in any case, the law is largely in Trump’s favor, thanks not only to recent Supreme Court decisions but to legislators and presidents of both parties, who have expanded executive emergency powers and eliminated meaningful due process protections. In our exercises, the courts largely allowed Trump’s actions to proceed—and when they ruled against him, he sometimes ignored court orders. Peaceful protests often backfired too, as they were easily framed as violent, with a little help from deepfakes, agents provocateurs, and a mainstream media prone to “both-sidesism.”
Defenders of democracy also struggled to develop coordinated approaches. While Team Trump had a clear leader, the opposition was rudderless and dispirited. Grassroots activists mistrusted congressional leaders, while civil society organizations competed with each other for funding and recognition. Nonaligned actors such as business leaders and career civil servants largely kept their heads down, hoping to hold on to their profits or their jobs.
Our exercises suggested that the greatest imminent threat to democracy isn’t civil war or mass detentions but age-old human weaknesses: lack of courage and imagination; difficulty overcoming collective-action problems; our desire to hope for the best instead of planning for the worst.
BUT SIMULATIONS DON’T PREDICT the future. On the contrary, they can serve as powerful wakeup calls, highlighting weaknesses before it’s too late to address them. Isolated and leaderless, defenders of democracy will struggle to effectively counter autocratic actions if Trump wins, but we still have time to create the communities and structures that enable people to stand firm in the face of abuses—if we start planning now.
Isolated individuals can be doxxed, harassed, and intimidated. But well-organized groups, whether churches, unions, or networks of community activists, can provide one another with support and help ranging from money and legal assistance to communications assistance, cybersecurity support, and physical protection for those facing threats to their safety.
At the state and local levels, governors, attorneys general, legislators, and mayors can coordinate across state and municipal lines, sharing information on how to protect their populations and enforce their laws in the face of abusive federal overreach. Nonprofits can start developing contingency options in case their tax-exempt status is lost. Donors can create pooled funds to move money quickly in emergencies. Business leaders and influential public figures can coordinate to decide on actions if various red lines are crossed. And political leaders who may find themselves on the outside can lay the groundwork for an opposition leadership structure, one in which figures as diverse as Kamala Harris, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and Barack Obama can help provide direction, coordination, and inspiration to the millions of Americans who don’t want to see the nation slide quietly into autocracy.
Our exercises made it clear that if we want to keep our democracy from fading away after a potential Trump win, we can’t wait until November to start organizing. There’s no deus ex machina to save us. We can’t rely on hope, and we can’t assume someone else will do the hard work while we keep our heads down.
Those much-vaunted “guardrails of democracy”? We the people are the only guardrails we’ve got.
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