It’s January 20, 2025, and Donald Trump is being sworn in for a second presidential term. In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, his rhetoric on border security has become increasingly inflammatory. Addressing a large rally, he has vowed to issue an executive order on his first day in office to “take back control of our border and use our powerful military and brave patriots to do the job that Biden failed to do.” In response, far-right extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Three Percenters have deployed to the border in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
On Inauguration Day, members of the Three Percenters ambush a family of migrants who have just crossed the southern border, killing three, including a child. A video of the incident goes viral, prompting widespread outrage. The newly inaugurated president defends the militia’s actions, spurring like-minded groups to stream to the border in solidarity.
Reacting to public outcry, the governor of Arizona activates the state’s National Guard to restore order, and New Mexico’s governor considers following suit. In response, Trump federalizes command of the National Guard in both states, setting up a constitutional showdown between state and federal executive authority. A burning question is on everyone’s mind: Will Trump invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military on domestic soil — and, in the process, grant himself virtually limitless authority?
This fictional — yet plausible — scenario was the starting point for Constitutional Thresholds, billed as an “interactive and immersive tabletop exercise and war game” and held on February 13 in Palo Alto, Calif., and Washington, D.C. The first of several war games planned for the coming months, it was organized by Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a political action committee founded and led by Dan Barkhuff of South Burlington.
Imagine a role-playing game with players who have served at the highest levels of government, politics and the U.S. military — all of them plotting their moves in dead earnest. Their mission? To explore the possibility that the next president will have little to no regard for the U.S. Constitution or the rule of law. Given that Trump’s lawyers recently argued before the Supreme Court that he enjoys absolute “presidential immunity” for the “official acts” he undertook during the January 6, 2021, insurrection, this game seems all too real.
A retired U.S. Navy SEAL who served multiple combat tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa, Barkhuff, 45, is now an emergency department physician at the University of Vermont Medical Center. He’s also an outspoken Trump critic. In 2020, he recorded a one-minute ad for the anti-Trump PAC the Lincoln Project, in which he called Trump “a coward” for failing to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin; in its first 24 hours, the ad was viewed more than 6 million times.
Since then, Barkhuff and Veterans for Responsible Leadership have enlisted the support of other veterans and never-Trump Republicans in the effort to prevent a second Trump presidency, which they see as an existential threat to U.S. democracy.
“We’re at an unprecedented, risky time in American politics,” Barkhuff said. “We’re walking this line of not wanting to be alarmist, but we kinda need to be.”
What Barkhuff and his colleagues can’t prevent, they hope to prepare for. To that end, they’ve organized the tabletop exercises, a training tool commonly used in the military and civilian emergency services to game out true-to-life scenarios. Afterward, participants and observers debrief and assess the strengths and weaknesses of their response.
For Constitutional Thresholds, in February, some two dozen participants in both California and D.C. were divided into two teams: the red cell, which represented senior Trump administration officials and militia leaders; and the blue cell, composed of anti-Trump state and local leaders, veterans, scholars and experts. As in other role-playing games, each participant was assigned a character and given a “role guide,” unseen by other players, that describes their character’s priorities and loyalties. They then engaged in real-time role-playing and decision-making, communicating in person and through the instant messaging app Slack.
Veterans for Responsible Leadership isn’t the only organization rehearsing crisis scenarios that could unfold in a second Trump term. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, for instance, are already drafting legal strategies to use if Trump were reelected and tried to push the boundaries of his executive authority.
“My biggest takeaway was, if this were to happen, it would be almost impossible to stop Trump.” Dan Barkhuff
But the Constitutional Thresholds simulation was notable for the high profiles of its participants. They included Miles Taylor, a chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Trump years. As “Anonymous,” Taylor wrote the September 5, 2018, New York Times op-ed piece “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” During February’s tabletop exercise, he served as national security adviser to Trump, who was played by Bill Kristol, conservative political commentator and founder of the Weekly Standard.
Other participants included Charles Luckey, a retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army; William Enyart, a retired adjutant general of the State of Illinois and former U.S. House member; Jean Galbraith, law professor and deputy dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School; and George Conway, a lawyer, anti-Trump activist and husband of former senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
Events unfolded rapidly during the six-hour exercise. At one point, Enyart, playing the role of adjutant general of the New Mexico National Guard, refused to execute an order from his state’s Democratic governor to disperse militia members. He was promptly relieved of command.
Barkhuff, who was assigned the role of a red cell militia leader, injected an unscripted variable into the game, which was permissible as long as it was consistent with his character’s profile.
“I wanted to see what would happen if we killed a police officer,” he said.
Later, 14 deputized militia members were killed in a shoot-out with authorities, providing legal justification for Kristol, as Trump, to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Ultimately, Kristol opted not to pull the trigger. As he told the Atlantic‘s Elliot Ackerman, the only member of the press invited to observe the war game, “Trump can be canny when his future is on the line. He’s got a sense that there are things he could do that would go too far … He’s a very effective demagogue.”
But Kristol’s analysis offered Barkhuff little consolation.
“My biggest takeaway was, if this were to happen, it would be almost impossible to stop Trump,” Barkhuff said.
Benjamin Radd, a lecturer of global studies, international and area studies, and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, designed the simulation and served as its impartial gamekeeper. Several themes emerged from his postgame assessment, which he compiled from the debriefing of participants and observers.
The blue cell, which seemed “decentralized and leaderless,” was “reactive rather than prescriptive,” Radd wrote, especially in the face of Trump’s “willingness to embrace chaos, pursue disorder, and break existing rules and norms.” While Trump and the red cell moved quickly, with military-style “shock and awe,” Radd continued, the slower-moving blue cell cared “more about getting it right,” with its “excessive reliance” on court orders, injunctions and other legal maneuvers.
The consensus among players afterward was that, in an unfolding crisis with no precedent, Trump would ignore the courts, which lack boots-on-the-ground enforcement power. Radd issued a warning: “Do not assume there will be any ‘grownups in the room’ with Trump; what guardrails existed before may likely be dismantled in advance.”
Despite its poor performance, the blue cell emerged with an action plan for future war games. To prevent an authoritarian takeover, the participants agreed, the blue cell would need to give the president incentives not to overreach.
Legally, Trump could deputize the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, according to several constitutional scholars Barkhuff consulted. However, he might be less inclined to do so if he knew beforehand that the International Longshoremen’s Association would react by striking, shutting down major ports throughout the U.S. Also, a walkout by even a small percentage of unionized commercial pilots, a third of whom have served in the military, could bring the economy to a standstill, Barkhuff said.
“We didn’t have the right people at the table,” he concluded. “We absolutely have to have organized labor.”
Barkhuff emphasized that the response from the left would need to be nonviolent for moral, ethical and practical reasons. As for the possibility of taking up arms against Trump, he said, “I don’t want that. Nobody wants that.”
In his March 19 Atlantic story “War-Gaming for Democracy,” Ackerman expressed skepticism about the exercise. He suggested that simulations such as Constitutional Thresholds are unhealthy for American democracy, regardless of who conducts them.
“Imagine if the Heritage Foundation, or any other right-wing advocacy group, hosted a set of veteran-led war games based around countering the sort of extraconstitutional violations that some conservatives already allege that Joe Biden is indulging,” he wrote. “It’s not hard to anticipate the denunciations that would flood in from the left.”
Barkhuff acknowledged the merit of Ackerman’s criticism — under normal circumstances, with any other Republican presidential candidate of recent years.
“But these are not normal times, and exceptional times demand exceptions,” he said. “If the fact that I fought in wars makes me a credible messenger, I’m going to use it to be a credible messenger. This is for all the marbles.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Crossing Thresholds | A local veteran discusses lessons learned from war-gaming a second Trump presidency”
This article appears in May 15-21, 2024.
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