Near the end of Donald Trump’s first and possibly only term as president, a fad took hold in the political class: live-action role-playing games.
In the summer of 2020, amid all the other weirdness of that year, a collection of academics, officials, and pundits called the Transition Integrity Project gamed out what they thought might happen if Trump refused to concede the election. A few months later, two Trumpier groups—the Claremont Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF)—responded with a post-election exercise built on a rather different worldview. Trump’s exile from D.C. didn’t end the trend: This year some folks from the TPPF joined forces with members of the Heritage Foundation to imagine the outcome if President Joe Biden refuses to leave office. (I think we can safely say that events have overtaken that one.) And now we have a documentary, War Game, that has been playing in select theaters and starts streaming on various platforms today. Here a cast ranging from retired Gen. Wesley Clark to former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (DNL–N.D.) simulates a bigger, noisier January 6 where a chunk of the military sides with the rioters.
Scenario planning, of course, is a well-established practice among everyone from business consultants to the Defense Department. (As the title suggests, the simulation in War Game is supposed to resemble a Pentagon war game.) There is nothing inherently wrong with it. But observers kept processing the LARPs of 2020 in one of two dubious ways. The first was to act as though we were reading about some sort of scientific experiment—a tool for prediction rather than planning. That wouldn’t be true even under ideal lab conditions, but it didn’t help that each of these exercises involved trying to get into the heads of people the organizers disliked. For example, the 2020 Transition Integrity Project tapped the famously anti-Trump pundit Bill Kristol to play Trump, a choice that tells you something about which Republicans were in the game designers’ contact list. (That said, Kristol did anticipate some of Trump’s moves. The most ridiculous moment in that group’s gameplay involved the Biden player going haywire: In one of the scenarios, he tried to get some leverage by encouraging the West Coast to secede.)
In the other dubious reading, these operations are elaborate plots to carry out these exact scenarios. Now, these exercises certainly do give us insights into the ways the people involved with them think: They show us what the game designers imagine is plausible, and they suggest how the role-players might imagine themselves acting in certain situations. But that doesn’t mean you can use one as a skeleton key to explain what happened after Election Day 2020 or to check out what’s in store for Election Day 2024.
It does mean it’s possible to imagine a wonderfully weird documentary about one of these games—a fly-on-the-wall, vérité-style record of powerful people thrust into a fiction and revealing themselves in their reactions to it. A movie like that could be a poker-faced, sometimes darkly comic masterpiece.
That, alas, is not the approach that the directors of War Game took. But if you peer closely enough at what they did do, you might occasionally feel like you’re catching out-takes from that other picture.
The scenario in War Game was devised by the Vet Voice Foundation, a group concerned about radicalization in the armed forces. Its dungeon masters sketched out a scenario where the 2024 election is contested, with a right-wing challenger accusing President John Hotham, played by former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, of cheating at the polls. Sympathetic D.C. guardsmen help protesters breach a security checkpoint outside the U.S. Capitol. A militant group called the Order of Columbus floods the internet with disinformation and organizes a takeover of the Arizona state legislature, where it holds lawmakers hostage. There are rumors of guardsmen firing on each other, and of crowds forming outside other statehouses.
In the situation room, the president’s circle debates whether overreacting or underreacting is the bigger risk. “You can authorize lethal force to protect law enforcement officers,” notes an advisor played by retired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan. When President Hotham interrupts—or is this Gov. Bullock breaking character?—to ask whether that is in fact true, Buchanan replies: “We’ve done it on the Southwest border.” And then Buchanan notes that Hotham could invoke the Insurrection Act and send in federal troops to enforce the law.
At this point, we are just half an hour into the movie. In the control room, one of the game masters whispers that the president “seems like he’s getting ready to use the Insurrection Act already.”
“Wow,” says another.
“How do we slow them down?” asks the first. “Or do we?”
“We don’t,” says the second. It becomes clear that they intended to dangle this option at some point, but that they didn’t expect it to become a live possibility so quickly.
The fog of war is in full effect. It is not entirely clear what is actually happening in the state capitols or how many troops and cops are loyal. Some states are asking for federal support; a couple declare that they don’t want it. And the clock is ticking: The government has just six hours to certify the election.
Throughout this, we get interviews with participants, including organizers from the Vet Voice Foundation. We also get dramatizations of events purportedly happening outside the scenario rooms. The movie goes out of its way to cue certain audience responses, with intrusive music and frequent reaction shots, and there does not seem to be much distance between the filmmakers’ perspective and the Vet Voice Foundation’s perspective.
And how does that shared perspective relate to the game we’re watching? Well, it’s complicated.
The foundation’s interest here, as I said, is radicalization in the armed forces. And the movie does have a sequence—by far its most thoughtful moment—in which one of the organizers, Kris Goldsmith, explains that he sees the insurgent character he plays as a man he could have become himself. He came home from Iraq a decade and a half ago: shellshocked, angry, disillusioned by the war and by the lies that had been told to sell it. “I do understand the insurgents,” he tells us. “I understand what led them down that path, because I was there.”
But this scenario takes place after a substantial slice of the military has already been radicalized; it’s not like the people in the situation room can hop back in time and undo the invasion of Iraq. The only way Goldsmith’s comments could conceivably relate directly to the gameplay is the fear of inadvertently radicalizing more people. And gradually, in fact, this begins to emerge as a concern.
The insurgents explicitly inform us that they are trying to provoke an overreaction that will sway more of the public to their side. (“What we want,” one says, “is U.S. troops mowing down patriots in the streets. If you do that, you play directly into the narratives that the U.S. government is massively overreaching their power.”) The film reminds us how Ashli Babbitt became a MAGA martyr figure after she was killed at the Capitol Riot, and then a montage rolls back through the years with images of Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State. Game designer Ben Radd points out that the Insurrection Act is a double-edged sword that can “amplify the violence” and “make a bad situation even worse.” Bullock notes that an unscrupulous leader could abuse it.
Some folks in the situation room are ready to clamp down hard. (One player, whose identity I could not make out, notes in a low voice that Abraham Lincoln himself suspended habeas corpus.) In the end—spoiler alert—the president opts not to invoke the act. (“That’s exactly what they should be doing,” Radd declares approvingly.) The Capitol is secured, and the election is certified without the White House seizing emergency powers.
You might detect the outlines of a civil libertarian message there. But how many people onscreen took it as one? In what we see of the post-game debrief, the talk seems focused on how to “screen out” potential “insider threats” within the military. That may be a topic the foundation wants these officials to think about, but it had no bearing on the choices people made during the game. If one of the gathered politicians said “Maybe we should try not to put returning veterans in the position that Kris here was in back in 2008,” that didn’t make the final cut.
Then again, how many lessons can you learn from an exercise where so much rests on deliberate design choices? A different group of game masters with a more authoritarian agenda could have loaded the dice so that the Insurrection Act was the only way to prevent complete chaos. And why was there a six-hour deadline in the first place? It’s not like the Constitution has an “If you don’t get the votes certified by midnight, The Purge begins” provision. Nor is a serious rebellion guaranteed to disperse just because its opponents have conducted a legal ritual. That ticking clock might inject urgency into the game and suspense into the movie, but it’s an artificial constraint.
But it is possible for people to reveal themselves when they play. I wouldn’t want to assume that all the figures onscreen are unveiling their true selves—they’re playing parts, after all—but we are surely learning something about how Bullock or Clark or Heitkamp would behave in a crisis, or how they think they’d behave, or how they’d like the people watching them in a movie to think they’d behave.
The film draws some mild comedy, possibly deliberate, from the way the war game strains not to be explicitly about Donald Trump. Early in the movie, one participant—Buchanan—tells us that “one of my conditions for participation” was “that it was not a partisan exercise.” Less than a minute later, one of the insurgents (Goldsmith) casually explains to another (Bill Kristol, who appears to be making a hobby of this) that the latter will be one of “the Bannon and Stone figures” of the scenario—a reference to the would-be Trump svengalis Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. The identities of the actual participants sometimes seem to fluctuate too: I’m not sure that Heidi Heitkamp’s character was supposed to be Heitkamp herself, but she still tells folks to call her Heidi, and they do.
And then there’s the moment when Wesley Clark asks the attorney general if the government could put the opposing candidate directly under surveillance. The president breaks in immediately to say that’s a bad idea. “No one has to know,” Clark insists. “But someone will at some point,” Bullock replies, smiling in a way that left me wondering just whose political future he was thinking about: the fictional President Hatham or the real-life Gov. Bullock. Clark looks a little amused too, as does Heitkamp, listening in. I doubt that there’s a single moment in this movie when these folks forgot that they were on camera. Games within games unfold.
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