How to Harden Our Defenses Against an Authoritarian President

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-harden-our-defenses-against-authoritarian-president

It is late afternoon on Inauguration Day 2025. Protesters fill the downtowns of American cities, enraging the newly sworn president. Send in the military, he demands. Invoke the Insurrection Act. Federalize the National Guard in all 50 states. Tell the troops to use all the force they need to clear the streets.

So began one of five tabletop exercises I co-led in May and June, along with former Defense Department official Rosa Brooks and historian Nils Gilman. We based the starting scenarios on the election of former president Donald Trump to a second term, and we asked participants playing the president, all of them Republicans or former Republicans, to base their gameplay on Trump’s publicly stated promises.

As a nonpartisan think tank, my employer, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, takes no position on how Americans should cast their votes. Nor do we predict who will win in November. Some of my colleagues are doing scenario planning for a Democratic victory, too.

The role-playing exercises were designed to test how well checks and balances, broadly understood, might restrain a president from abusing his power. The results were not encouraging: The games demonstrated repeatedly that an authoritarian in control of the executive branch, with little concern for legal limits, holds a structural advantage over any lawful effort to restrain him.

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