On Thursday, the Washington Post ran an article written by Georgetown professor Rosa Brooks that presented the frightening conclusion that the only safe outcome for America in this year’s presidential election is a Joe Biden landslide victory. The story read like a veiled threat to Americans who might be persuaded to vote Trump in November.
The Post’s tweet promoting the article put it this way: “The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis. In every scenario except a Biden landslide, our simulation ended catastrophically.”
Brooks and her colleagues at the Transition Integrity Project — a supposedly bipartisan election monitoring group — ran through a series of scenarios that concluded that unless Joe Biden wins and wins convincingly, the United States is in for a violent few months.
As if we haven’t seen enough violence already from Democratic front groups Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
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According to Brooks, only “a landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.”
Calling their exercises “war games,” the Transition Integrity Project didn’t enlist even one pro-Trump participant in the discussions on their scenarios. Instead, the analysts included GOP “never Trumpers” such as Republican strategist Bill Kristol, who in February tweeted, “We are all Democrats now”; former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele; and former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson.
The Democrat side was played by party stalwarts John Podesta, who ran Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2016 campaign; former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile; and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. The “war games” also included a smattering of political strategists, journalists, polling experts, social-media experts, and former officials from the Justice Department, the military and the Department of Homeland Security.
The exercises explored four scenarios that Transition Integrity Project experts saw as most likely: A narrow Biden win; a Biden landslide with Biden easily winning both the popular vote and the electoral college; a Trump victory similar to 2016 where Trump wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote; and a period of extended uncertainty as we saw in 2000 with the highly contested election of George W. Bush over Al Gore.
Whoever played the Trump team were clearly intended to be the “bad guys” in this grown-up version of cops and robbers. The Biden Campaign was portrayed much the same as their candidate: befuddled and struggling to catch up.
“In each scenario Team Trump — the players assigned to simulate the Trump Campaign and its elected and appointed allies — was ruthless and unconstrained right out of the gate, and Team Biden struggled to get out of reaction mode.”
One exercise found that Trump’s constant allegations of fraudulent mail-in ballots would lead National Guard troops in Democrat districts to “destroy thousands of ballots.”
Brooks laughably alleges that in their scenarios, the Biden camp calls supporters to the streets to “peacefully protest” and demand that Trump concede. The Trump camp, on the other hand, would encourage violence and use the resulting chaos to call in the National Guard or even active duty military units into the cities to “restore order.”
As an aside, Brooks wrote: “The exercises underscored the tremendous power enjoyed by an incumbent president: Biden can call a news conference, but Trump can call in the 82nd Airborne.”
The Trump team was sneaky too: “Team Trump repeatedly attempted to exploit ambiguities and gaps in the legal framework.”
The gamers claimed that the Trump team would persuade GOP allies in states where the results were extremely close to send rival sets of electors to Congress for the formal counting of electors that occurs on January 6. In that scenario, Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, would claim that only he had authority to decide which set of electors to recognize.
In the Trump-wins scenario, the gamers floated the idea that California, Oregon, and Washington might secede from the union rather than be a part of a nation with Donald Trump at the helm for four more years. Or, that they would use that threat in order to obtain concessions from the GOP that would make future Republican electoral victories all but impossible.
And in every scenario except for a Biden landslide, the gamers claimed — possibly correctly — that the courts would hold a great deal of sway in the eventual outcome of the election.
If the Washington Post article reads like a threat to America, that’s because it is one. Clearly, they are saying that the only acceptable outcome for the country is a large Biden victory. If any of those other scenarios play out, the nation is in for a rocky ride. The article may be even more than a threat; perhaps, it’s a promise.
Photo: erlucho / iStock / Getty Images Plus
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects. He can be reached at [email protected].
