NEW YORK — Election results are contested. Far-right extremists groups are plotting to overthrow the electoral college vote count. Protesters gather in Washington. TV news screens blare: “Capitol in Chaos.”
In the White House Situation Room, the president gathers with advisors to consider their next moves. Only this is not January 6th, 2021, but a simulation of an insurrection very much like it.
In January last year, a group of former generals, senators, governors, and civil servants gathered in a Washington D.C. hotel to run an exercise, a war game, to experience the United States on the brink of civil war in January 2025, and, maybe, to find a few ways to avoid a widely shared American nightmare.
In this queasily familiar but slightly alternate reality, the incumbent is President John Hotham, played by the former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock.
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“Wherever we are on the political spectrum, preserving the rule of law and the underpinnings of this 250-year experiment is pretty damn important,” says Bullock. “It is concerning to me that the vice presidential nominee (JD Vance) said if he was Mike Pence he would have done otherwise. But we have got to remember, there are things more important than an individual election and that’s sort of the promise that this country has offered.”
