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      Trump 2020 election interference case resumes after immunity decision

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      Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election was set to resume on Friday with narrowed charges, after the US supreme court ruling that gave former presidents broad immunity took effect and the case returned to the control of the presiding trial judge.The formal transfer of jurisdiction back to the US district judge Tanya Chutkan means she can issue a scheduling order for how she intends to proceed – including whether she will hold public hearings to determine how to apply the immunity decision.The nation’s highest court issued its ruling on Trump’s immunity claim last month. But the case has only now returned to Chutkan’s control because of the 25-day waiting period for any rehearing requests and an additional week for the judgment to be formally sent down.How Chutkan proceeds could have far-reaching ramifications on the scope of the case, and the presidential election in November.Trump is accused of overseeing a sprawling effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, including two counts of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election results, conspiring to defraud the government and conspiring to disenfranchise voters.The alleged illegal conduct includes Trump pressing US justice department officials to open sham investigations, Trump obstructing Congress from certifying the election, including by trying to co-opt his vice president, Trump helping prompt the Capitol attack, and Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors.But the supreme court decided that criminal accountability for presidents has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.View image in fullscreenTrump’s lawyers are expected to argue that Chutkan can decide whether the conduct is immune based on legal arguments alone, negating the need for witnesses or multiple evidentiary hearings, the Guardian first reported, citing people familiar with the matter.Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue the maximalist position that they considered all of the charged conduct was Trump acting in his official capacity as president and therefore presumptively immune – and incumbent on prosecutors to prove otherwise, the people said.And Trump’s lawyers are expected to suggest that even though the supreme court appeared to contemplate evidentiary hearings to sort through the conduct – it referenced “fact-finding” – any disputes can be resolved purely on legal arguments, the people said.In doing so, Trump will try to foreclose witness testimony that could be politically damaging, because it would cause evidence about his efforts to subvert the 2020 election that has polled poorly to be suppressed, and legally damaging because it could cause Chutkan to rule against Trump.Trump’s lawyers have privately suggested they expect at least some evidentiary hearings to take place, but they are also intent on challenging testimony from people such as Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and other high-profile White House officials.For instance, if prosecutors try to call Pence or his chief of staff, Marc Short, to testify about meetings where Trump discussed stopping the January 6 certification, Trump would try to block that testimony by asserting executive privilege and having Pence assert the speech or debate clause protection.Trump has already been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, principally by convincing the supreme court to take the immunity appeal in the 2020 election subversion case, which was frozen while the court considered the matter.The delay strategy thus far has been aimed at pushing the cases until after the November election, in the hope that Trump would be re-elected and then appoint as attorney general a loyalist who would drop the charges.But now, even if Trump loses, his lawyers have coalesced on a legal strategy that could take months to resolve depending on how prosecutors choose to approach evidentiary hearings, adding to additional months of anticipated appeals over what Chutkan determines are official acts. More

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      Key Black Muslim group backs Kamala Harris for president over Gaza stance

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      Kamala Harris has won the backing for her presidential bid of a key US Muslim organization that had declined to endorse Joe Biden before he withdrew from his re-election campaign.The switch to Harris was a sign that those who voted “uncommitted” instead of actively voting for Biden in the primary, because of their objections to his response to Israel’s war on Gaza, may have found an ally in his vice-president.The group is the political action arm of the non-profit organization the Black Muslim Leadership Council, which was created in March to put pressure on the Biden administration to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.Salima Suswell, the founder and chief executive of the Black Muslim Leadership Council Fund, told NBC on Thursday: “[Harris] has shown more sympathy towards the people of Gaza then both President Biden and Former President Donald Trump.“During Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to Congress, she decided not to attend. She has repeatedly called for a ceasefire, and I believe she has also expressed empathy towards civilian life and has been very caring as it relates to getting aid to the people of Gaza.”The move signals growing support for a Harris presidency from Democratic groups that were reluctant to support or were outright against another Biden term.The Harris campaign said it was “grateful to BMLC for their support”.“The vice-president is committed to combating Islamophobia wherever it exists and advancing opportunity for black Americans,” a Harris campaign spokesperson said in a statement. “We look forward to working with BMLC to win this November and defeat Donald Trump’s divisive, unpopular agenda.”Although Muslim Americans make up a small percentage of the electorate, they can prove to be crucial in battleground states in which they represent a large swath of the population.Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020, but many have since withdrawn their support due to the US’s strong support for Israel in its war in Gaza. Palestine, with a Muslim-majority population, and the rights of Palestinians, remain key issues for Muslim voters in the US.Harris has repeatedly called for a ceasefire in Gaza and a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine as the way forward to achieve sustainable Middle East peace.Harris has voiced support for Palestinians and said she “condemn[s] any individuals associating with the brutal terrorist organization Hamas”, but she has not explicitly broken with the Biden administration stance to condemn Israel for the killing and forced relocation of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Neither Biden nor the vice-president have called for an arms embargo on Israel – a point many Muslim, Arab American and progressive voters take issue with.In a meeting with Netanyahu in Washington last week Harris said she told him she “will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias, such as Hamas and Hezbollah”.But she added: “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters.” She also said she would “not be silent” about civilian deaths and suffering in Gaza.A movement to vote uncommitted in the Democratic presidential primaries took off in swing-state Michigan and spread, garnering more than 700,000 ballots for the uncommitted cause.The Uncommitted National Movement is pushing for representation at the Democratic national convention later this month in Chicago.Abbas Alawieh, an uncommitted delegate from Michigan, told the Guardian that Harris had “expressed a level of concern about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza that perhaps we weren’t seeing from the president”.Alawieh added: “We’re getting more engagement than we did under President Biden being at the top of the ticket, and so I’m hopeful that we can move in a direction that leads to her engaging directly.” More

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      Kamala Harris wins enough delegate votes for Democratic nomination

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      Kamala Harris on Friday said she was “honored” to have secured enough votes from delegates to become the Democratic presidential nominee, making her the first Black woman and person of south Asian heritage to lead a major party ticket.Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, announced that the vice-president had earned the majority of delegates’ votes to become the party’s nominee to challenge Donald Trump in November, though her nomination would not be official until Monday, the end of the virtual roll-call vote.“I am honored to be the presumptive Democratic nominee,” Harris said during an online meeting of supporters that was broadcast live. Her ascent from running mate to party nominee caps a volatile few weeks in US politics that saw the party’s presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, end his bid for re-election following a disastrous debate performance that ignited a storm of calls from elected Democrats, donors and activists to step aside.“With the support of more than 50% of all delegates just one day into voting, Vice-President Harris has the overwhelming backing of the Democratic party and will lead us united in our mission to defeat Donald Trump in November,” Harrison said in a statement. “But I want to be clear – there is still time for delegates to cast their ballots. I encourage every single delegate across the country to meet this moment and cast their ballot so that we head into our convention in Chicago with a show of force as a united Democratic party.”In the video call, Harrison said the speed at which the party had coalesced around Harris was “unprecedented” and vowed the party would “rally around Vice-President Kamala Harris and demonstrate the strength of our party” at its convention in Chicago.Before Biden dropped out, the party had opted to hold a virtual roll call to formally nominate him before the convention due to concerns about meeting a ballot deadline in Ohio. Harris will formally accept the nomination in person at the party’s convention, held from 19 to 22 August. Republicans formally nominated Trump to be their presidential nominee for a third consecutive time at the party’s convention in Milwaukee last month, just days after the former president survived an assassination attempt. At the convention he unveiled his choice for running mate, the hard-right Ohio senator JD Vance.Harris is expected to announce her running mate next week, after a lightning-fast vetting process. The vice-president is expected to interview a list of potential contenders over the weekend. Among the leading Democrats are the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, the Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear, the Arizona senator Mark Kelly and the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg.Earlier on Friday, Harris’s campaign announced that it had raised $310m last month, a stunning amount that was fueled in part by a surge in donations from women and young voters. The campaign said two-thirds of the haul came from first-time donors. It raised more than $200m during Harris’s first week as a presidential candidate, meaning most of the haul came after her elevation to the top of the ticket.In a tweet on Friday, Biden said he “couldn’t be prouder” of Harris, whose selection as his vice-president he called “one of the best decisions I’ve made”.“Let’s win,” he wrote. More

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      Secret Service takes ‘full responsibility’ for Trump shooting security failures

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      The US Secret Service takes “full responsibility” for the events that led up to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last month, the acting director of the agency said on Friday.In a press conference in Washington, Ronald Rowe, who replaced Kimberly Cheatle after she stood down from her position as director of the service after Trump was shot, said: “This was a failure.”He said agents should have had better cover of the vantage points, from where a 20-year-old gunman ended up firing shots at the former president while he spoke at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month.Trump is the Republican nominee for president, and a bullet grazed his ear as he was addressing the crowd, when shots rang out, killing one in the crowd and injuring others.The gunman, Thomas Crooks, fired several shots from a rifle after positioning himself on a warehouse roof that Rowe admitted “was not far” from the stage where Trump was speaking. Crooks was killed by government counter-snipers. Rowe said agents should have had “eyes” on that position beforehand.“We should have had better coverage on that roof line,” he said.The agency is conducting an internal investigation and Rowe said disciplinary action would be taken if necessary, and procedures will be changed.He said the Secret Services did not have “any idea” the shooter had a gun until shots were fired.There was a failure in communications and surveillance of the area in the run-up to the rally, Rowe said. No one was trying to push blame on to local law enforcement, he added.There had been speculation earlier that local police should have been able to stop the assailant and also warn the federal agents effectively before he opened fire from the roof of a warehouse with a sight line to the rally stage.Rowe said that local law enforcement communicated to the federal agency that there was a man on the roof, but the message did not reach the Secret Service.He added that federal agents were not present at the command post that was being run by local law enforcement.They were the first to see a man get up on to the roof of the warehouse, which turned out to be the shooter.The gunman had looked up online the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy, and had flown a drone over the rally site, before shooting Trump.“We want to deter people from even thinking about doing something like this again,” Rowe said. More

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      The Guardian view on Guantánamo Bay: betraying the victims of terrorism too | Editorial

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      There is no neat exit point from grief. Each anniversary, each life event, each addition to or loss from the family, can bring renewed pain to the bereaved. For relatives of the almost 3,000 killed in the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, that suffering has been compounded by the lack of accountability for their deaths.This week, the US announced that it had reached a plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described as the attack’s architect, and two accomplices, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi. They will avoid the death penalty, instead receiving life sentences in exchange for pleading guilty to all the offences with which they were charged. Negotiations continue with two more men. All have been in US custody since 2002, and are held at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba. For many relatives, there is anger that there will be no trial, and in some cases that the men will not be executed. But for others there is some relief that after 23 years there is a kind of conclusion to the case, however partial and unsatisfactory.Last year, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the first UN rights investigator to be allowed to visit since the camp’s establishment, described its use of torture as “a betrayal of the rights of victims” of terrorism, as well as breaching the rights of those who had spent more than two decades in indefinite detention. Torture was not merely the standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay. It was its raison d’etre. Men were taken there because it lay outside the rule of law. The abuse, however, made it essentially impossible to proceed with material derived from their interrogations, even under the conditions of a military tribunal rather than a criminal trial. Victims of torture lie so that it will stop. This week’s plea deals are not a vindication of the site’s existence: quite the opposite. Over a decade of pretrial hearings have been absorbed by litigating torture, rather than establishing responsibility for terrorism.While conditions have improved, Prof Ní Aoláin, then the special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, wrote that detainees were still subject to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”, in addition to living with the “unrelenting harms” from previous abuses. Several have killed themselves; others have been left with severe mental illness.Guantánamo Bay should never have been opened. This was the conclusion not only of human rights groups and lawyers, but of the US general tasked with setting up the detention camp, Michael Lehnert. Even without considering the moral and legal case, he – like others – quickly concluded that many detainees had little intelligence value, and insufficient evidence linking them to war crimes. Of the hundreds kept there, only 18 have been charged with a crime. In 2009, Barack Obama, then US president, vowed to shut the facility within a year. But despite releases and transfers, around 30 men are still held, at a cost of around $14m each annually.The conclusion of a legal process – however inadequate – means that for some, the detention camp will become more akin to a prison. But as Maj Gen Lehnert wrote almost a decade ago, it is hard to overstate the damage caused by its continuing existence. Repressive governments use it to deflect attacks on their own policies; violent extremists employ it as a recruiting tool. As long as it remains open, the place “where due process goes to die” will remain a stain upon the US. More

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      How Kamala Harris can lose the cop’s badge and still look tough | Judith Levine

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      Kamala Harris has struggled to establish a clear political identity, and much of the trouble comes from her record as a prosecutor in California. In 2004, as San Francisco district attorney, she declined to seek the death penalty for a man convicted of killing a police officer (he received a life sentence). Ten years later, when the state supreme court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional, Harris, then the state attorney general, appealed against the decision.As California attorney general – a position she held from 2011 to 2017 – Harris launched reforms such as the program to prevent recidivism among young first-time nonviolent drug offenders. The program, Back on Track, offered individual support and job training and replaced jail time with community service – a “revolutionary” idea at the time, noted Mother Jones editorial director and veteran Harris-watcher Jamilah King. Yet Harris’s office opposed the release of non-violent offenders from California prisons, in defiance of a court order to reduce overcrowding.Harris made some downright retrograde decisions as well, such as defending wrongful convictions won through proven official misconduct and, most famously, supporting legislation to fine, even lock up, parents of habitually truant students.She tried to please both sides by calling herself a “progressive prosecutor”. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, she ran to the left of Joe Biden on most criminal justice issues, including solitary confinement and marijuana legalization. The anti-policing and prison abolitionist communities were not persuaded, however. Journalist and law professor Lara Bazelon wrote a damning op-ed headlined “Kamala Harris was not a ‘progressive prosecutor’.” Activists launched the hashtag #KamalaIsACop. Yet in 2024, even as such mistrust lingers, Republicans are painting their opponent as a “defund-the-police” radical masquerading as a cop.Now the Harris campaign feels it’s found a winner: “Prosecutor versus felon” portrays the Democrat as a tough seeker of justice, experienced in vanquishing Donald Trump’s “type”– sexual “predators”, business fraudsters, tax cheats. “Prosecutor had a ‘cop’ connotation to it when she initially ran,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told the Atlantic. “It does not now. It has a connotation of standing up, taking on powerful interests – being strong, being effective – so it’s a very different frame.”For voters worried that Democrats are too soft on crime, the image may be compelling. But for others whose support Harris needs, a prosecutor is always a cop, and a cop is not the good guy. How can she own her record honorably and show critics that she can do better?Harris can reframe her stances on criminal justice according to the principles of restorative justice – and use that frame to define the contrast between herself and Trump.Restorative justice (RJ) is a practice that facilitates communication between people who’ve been harmed and those responsible for the harm. The goals are accountability and repair. The harm-doer takes responsibility for his acts. The RJ “circle” decides how he can repair the harm. If he does so honestly, he is welcomed back into the community whose values and rules he has transgressed.Accountability, RJ contends, is more effective than punishment. The defendant’s role – and the defense attorney’s job – in court is to deny guilt, even if he’s guilty. Punishment often reinforces that denial and stirs resentment, especially if it’s excessive, as it commonly is in the US.As California attorney general, Harris has said, her job was to enforce the law – to convict and punish – even when she didn’t endorse it. But as senator, when she had a chance to make better laws, she did – or tried to. In 2019, before a primary debate, she unveiled a 14-page plan to overhaul the criminal justice system, including ending the death penalty and solitary confinement. In 2020, she co-sponsored the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have lowered the standard of proof in police misconduct cases and restrict no-knock searches and chokeholds, the precursors of many police shootings. The bill did not pass, but Harris continues to promote it.Last week, she released a statement condemning the killing of Sonya Massey in her home by an Illinois sheriff’s deputy after she contacted the police for help. The statement called on Congress to pass the Floyd Act and concluded: “We must come together to achieve meaningful reforms that advance the safety of all communities.”Restorative justice aims for safe communities, too – not more policing – a distinction Harris has come to embrace. She’s not going to defund the police. But she has spoken up for redirecting a portion of their budgets to things that enhance public safety, like education.Trump’s idea of justice is the antithesis of restorative. His answer to conflict is vengeance. “I am your justice,” he declared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in March. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed” – himself most persecuted of all – “I am your retribution.” This statement was preceded and followed by lies, the central tactic of his MO, along with denying wrongdoing, evading responsibility, defaulting on debts, and projecting his flaws on to others – all also antithetical to RJ, whose bedrock is good faith.In response to the constant malfeasance, Harris plays the prosecutor, whose task, she recently told CNN, is “presenting and reminding folks about the empirical evidence that shows us exactly how we arrived at this point”. Trump, she added, “can’t hide” from the facts.But the crimes of Trumpism are not Trump’s alone, and the harm it has done is bigger than his personal law-breaking. Here again, the language of RJ is useful: it speaks of harm, not crime. By tweaking her image from crime-fighter to harm-repairer, Harris can define justice and injustice capaciously.After all, some things that are illegal, such as voluntary sex work, are not harmful, and not everything harmful is illegal. Trump paid a porn star to keep quiet about their sexual encounter and covered up the payments to enhance his electoral prospects. That’s a crime. Then he appointed three US supreme court justices, which was legal, even though they’ve caused exponentially greater harm than the $130,000 payoff. Trump cheated on his taxes, a felony. Then he pushed through a massive tax cut for the rich, which has increased economic inequality and beggared the public sector: all legal.RJ’s more radical cousin, transformative justice, contends that it’s not enough to hold individuals accountable. You have to change the systems that enable, condone, and promote harm, from lax gun laws to corporate giveaways to abortion bans.I for one can’t wait to see the ex-president held accountable for trying to burn the ballots of millions of citizens. But convicting Trump of treason is just day one. Released from the narrow ambit of law enforcer, more powerful than the single lawmaker, President Harris could work to restore truth to politics, repair the harms of inequity, and move toward social and economic justice, which includes public safety. She could defend democracy – not just be the good cop to Trump’s bad cop.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More

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      ‘We have to be voting biblically’: the Courage Tour rallies Christians to get Trump in office

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      By 9am on Monday, hundreds of worshipers who had gathered under a tent in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, were already on their feet. Praiseful music bumped from enormous speakers. The temperature was pushing 90F (32C).The congregants had gathered in north-western Wisconsin for the Courage Tour, a travelling tent revival featuring a lineup of charismatic preachers and self-styled prophets promising healing, and delivering a political message: register to vote. Watch, or work, the polls. And help deliver the 2024 election to Donald Trump.Serving as a voter registration drive and hub for recruiting poll workers, it was no mistake that the Courage Tour came to Wisconsin just three months ahead of the presidential election in November. The tour had already visited three other swing states: Georgia, Michigan and Arizona.Heavy-hitting Maga organizations – including America First Policy Institute, TPUSA Faith and America First Works – had a presence outside the tent. Inside, headlining the event was Lance Wallnau, a prominent figure in the New Apostolic Reformation – a movement on the right that embraces modern-day apostles, aims to establish Christian dominion over society and politics and has grown in influence since Trump was elected president in 2016.“‘Pray for your rulers,’ that’s about as far as we got in the Bible,” said Wallnau, setting the tone for the day, which would feature a series of sermons focused on the ideal role of Christians in government and society. “I think what’s happened is over time, we began to realize you cannot trust that government like you thought you could trust, and you can’t trust the media to tell you what’s really happening,” he exclaimed.What followed in Wallnau’s morning sermon were a series of greatest hits of the Maga right: January 6 (not an insurrection), the 2020 election (marred by fraud) and Covid-19 (a Chinese bioweapon).Many of the attendees had learned of the event from Eau Claire’s Oasis church – a Pentecostal church whose congregants were already familiar with the movement’s goal to turn believers into activists with a religious mission.“This is wonderful,” said Cyndi Lund, an Oasis churchgoer who attended the four-day event. “I teach a class on biblical citizenship – the Lord put in my heart that we have to be voting biblically, and if nothing else, we have a duty in America to vote.”According to the preachers who sermonized on Monday, the correct biblical worldview is a deeply conservative one. The speakers repeatedly stated their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, ideas that were elaborated on in pamphlets passed around the crowd and on three large screens facing the audience. (“Tolerance IS NOT A commandment,” read one poster, propped up in front of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA stall outside the tent.)After Wallnau spoke, Bill Federer, an evangelist who has written more than thirty books weighing in on US history from an anti-communist and rightwing perspective, offered a brief and often intensely inaccurate, intellectual history of the US and Europe. During his talk, Federer dropped references to the villains of his historiography – among them Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, the German philosopher Hegel and, “a little closer to home”, the political theorist of the New Left, Saul Alinsky. The crowd, apparently already versed in Federer’s intellectual universe, groaned and booed when Federer mentioned Alinsky.Federer also railed on “globalists”, tapping into the longstanding antisemitic idea of a shadowy cabal led by wealthy Jewish people who dictate world events.“Globalists,” Federer said, “are giving money to LGBTQ activists to get involved with politics.”It would be up to God-fearing Christians with a biblical worldview to push back against “wokeism”, by influencing what New Apostolic Reformers refer to as the “seven mountains” of society: religion, family, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and, most important at the Courage Tour, government.The stakes, emphasized many of the speakers, couldn’t be overstated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What we’re up against aren’t people,” said Mercedes Sparks, speaking on the topic of the secularization of US life. “These are spirits.” Sparks made clear her explicit goal – shared by the other speakers on the tour – of bringing Christianity into politics and government. But despite invoking an intense form of Christian nationalism, the speakers at the Courage Tour repeatedly decried the label as a smear.“This whole idea of Christian nationalism, it’s kind of interesting, right?” said Sparks, who claimed the term amounts to a form of persecution against Christian Americans. “This term that’s being thrown around, that I really think is designed to shame Christians into not voting and not being engaged like any other group that makes up America.”By the end of the day, the speakers had warmed up the crowd for the afternoon’s natural conclusion: a call to get involved.Joshua Caleb, a speaker at the event who described himself as a former Republican opposition researcher, called on attendees to join his organization, The Lion of Judah – a group which, according to its website, aims to unleash “the ROAR of Christian Voters across America” and urges members to “fight the fraud” by becoming election workers. Event organizers handed out flyers provided by the Trump-aligned America First Works and the evangelical group Faith and Freedom, urging pastors to help their congregants get registered to vote before the November election.Not all attendees were prepared for the speakers’ political, and often dire, message.“It’s too intense for me,” said Kahmara Kelly, who is 20 years old and recently joined the Oasis church. “My body just doesn’t like the tension that could come with it, and the conflict, so I just try avoiding politics.” At times, Kelly left the tent for a breath of air.“Not gonna lie, I was ready to just walk away,” Kelly added. More

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      ‘It’s not a theoretical proposition’: the ‘war game’ imagining a coup in the US

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      On 6 January 2025, US democracy stands at a crossroads. Congress must certify the results of an election that the loser refuses to concede. The Capitol is besieged by a wave of protesters who believe the election was stolen. Some of them are armed and determined to seize power for their leader. Similar groups have amassed at state capitols around the country. And a portion of the DC National Guardsmen – as well as a portion of the US military, including a handful of high-ranking officials – are on their side.This is a fictional scenario, played out in a “war game” simulation with real government and military officials in a mock situation room. But according to a new documentary capturing the role-playing exercise, such a crisis of authority – and the fracturing of the military along partisan lines – is a very real possibility in the politically polarized US, one that we should prepare for. “It’s not a theoretical proposition,” said Jesse Moss (Boys State, Girls State), a co-director of War Game, now playing in US theaters. “Even a very small sliver of the US active duty military that chooses to side with, say, a defeated candidate in a national election, could destabilize our country and put our democracy in jeopardy.”War Game, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, observes the six-hour event held at a Washington DC hotel room in January 2023. The simulation, developed by the Vet Voice Foundation, is one of several role-playing exercises developed in response to the events of January 6, to help military and government officials prepare for another worst-case scenario. How will the US government react if it happens again? And what if the president can’t count on the support of the military? Nearly one in five January defendants had a military background. In May 2021, 124 retired general and admirals signed an open letter propagating the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. As Benjamin Radd, a game producer who viscerally recalls living through the breakdown of institutional authority in 1979 Iran, puts it: “Think about the unthinkable.”While other exercises, such as those recently led by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Democracy Futures Project, focus specifically on role-playing responses to a second Trump presidency, War Game mostly doesn’t name the elephant in the room, examining instead the forces and potentials of political extremism in the US. The distance – using footage of January 6, but not naming the names – allowed for some renewed urgency and clarity. “Sometimes it’s impossible to see something that’s right in front of you,” said Tony Gerber, the film’s other co-director. “And you have to find new ways to show people that thing, because there’s this sort of intentional blindness to see that thing that’s right there.”The exercise participants, a bipartisan group of military and cabinet officials from the last five presidential administrations, must respond to what is essentially a more organized version of January 6. The so-called “red cell”, developed by military veterans Kristofer Goldsmith and Chris Jones, present a multi-faceted and mutating threat on the ground and online, where the situation room – comprised of mock president-elect Hotham (former Montana governor Steve Bullock) and his team of advisers – must also fight an information game. Jones and Goldsmith, both experts on domestic extremist movements who understand veterans’ disillusionment with the government’s status quo, based their mock insurgency group, the Order of Columbus, on Trump’s Maga movement, the conspiracy quasi-religion known as QAnon and far-right paramilitary groups involved in the Capitol attack, such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.Participants – including former senator Heidi Heitkamp, retired major general of the Maryland national guard Linda Singh, Lt Gen (Ret) Jeffrey Buchanan, former senator Doug Jones and Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump – must decide how to combat a metastasizing threat, complete with mock news coverage, speeches and social media posts egging insurgents to follow their “real” leader. They must contend with a video from a high-ranking general, based on the former Trump official and Stop the Steal rally speaker Michael Flynn, calling on the military to disobey the commander in chief. With the DC Guardsmen compromised, should they mobilize other national guards? Should the federal government get involved in coup attempts at state capitols? How much force is too much? And when, if ever, should the president invoke the Insurrection Act, considered the game’s nuclear option, which allows the executive to deploy the US military on its own citizens? (Though the film-makers had total editorial control, they ran potential security issues by Vet Voice: “We didn’t want to give any insurrectionists a handbook to stage a coup,” said Moss.)That last decision is particularly resonant, given the law’s potential for great destruction in the wrong hands. The film’s one mention of Donald Trump by name comes in footage from the Congressional January 6 hearings, in which Jason van Tatenhove, a former member of the Oath Keepers, confirmed that the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, urged then president Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, promising that veterans would support him. “Regardless of the outcome of this election, that act is a power the president has, and it’s a power that’s worth thinking about,” said Moss.View image in fullscreen“This film doesn’t lose its meaning and its relevance with this election,” Gerber added. “A problem like this doesn’t metastasize overnight. This has been cooking and growing and coming to fruition for years. And we as a nation have to ask ourselves, how did we get here?”To that end, the film attempts to “understand, with empathy, how a young man or a young woman coming home after serving overseas could be radicalized”, said Gerber. In cutaways from the real-time exercise, Goldsmith, Jones and game designer Janessa Goldbeck movingly discuss the real threat of extremism in the military, particularly for veterans struggling to reintegrate into society after service, in wars based on government lies or obfuscation, in a country where fewer and fewer civilians have personal ties to the armed forces. They’ve witnessed it, in themselves or in loved ones. “I do understand the insurgents,” says Goldsmith in the film. “I understand what led them down that path. Because I was there after I got home from Iraq.”For participants in the game, the exercise offered a rattling six hours of both anxiety and the empowerment of preparation. The simulation had “real intentional utility”, said Moss, in that it produced a report shared with policymakers, but also as way to excise fear, anger and shock over what happened four years ago this January, over what is still dividing the country. “These divisions, these fears, this extremism – it’s not over there. It’s right here. It’s within our country. It’s within our family,” said Moss. The film provides “a kind of catharsis to deal with the traumas that we carry, and to think about, in hopefully a constructive way, where we might be going”.

      War Game is out now in New York and will expand to other cities on 9 August, with a UK date to be announced More