‘Think about the unthinkable’: could the US handle an even worse January 6?
Is the US government prepared to withstand another January 6? That’s the question a new documentary sparking conversation at the Sundance film festival chillingly poses, arguing that US government and military officials must brace for the possibility of a potential political coup in a divided America.
War Game, directed by Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, observes a closeddoor, unscripted simulation of an armed attack on the Capitol based on the events of 6 January 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters and farright stormed the building to disrupt lawmakers’ certification of Joe Biden’s election. The six-hour exercise asked a bipartisan group of US defense, intelligence and elected policymakers spanning five presidential administrations to role-play the administrative response to a political coup backed by rogue members of the US military in the wake of a contested election.
The exercise was developed by the Vet Voice Foundation, an organization helping military veterans in civic leadership and policy, to help US government officials practice responses to a January 6-level threat to democracy and understand the threat of extremism from within the military. The film notes that one in five criminal defendants from the Capitol attack were military veterans.
January 6 “did not surprise those who follow far-right movement”, says Kristofer Goldsmith, a combat veteran from the war in Iraq who developed the game’s “red cell” of insurgents. War Game opens with footage of Goldsmith and his colleague Chris Jones scouting out Washington DC for how a potential social media and conspiracy theoryfueled mob attack would unfold. Both experts on domestic extremist movements, the two based their mock insurgency group, the Order of Columbus, on Q-Anon, Donald Trump’s Maga movement and far-right groups involved in the Capitol attack, such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.
The war game, held at a hotel in Washington, DC in January 2023, imagines a fictional 6 January 2025, in which the Order of Columbus has called an attack on Congress to prevent the certification of President Hotham (played by the former Montana governor Steve Bullock) after a contested election. Bullock’s president, in a war room with several advisors, intelligence officers and military heads, must decide how to respond to an escalating series of threats including: the storming of the Capitol aided by rogue national guard members, disinformation on social media and coordinated uprisings on several state capitols. They must contend with messages from a Trump-like rival candidate inciting more violence, and 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.
The point of the exercise is to “think about the unthinkable”, says Benjamin Radd, a game producer who recalls living through Iran’s 1979 revolution as a child, in which stability and institutional authority collapsed. Do you respond with a strong show of force? How much force? Focus on messaging? When do things get dire enough to justify invoking the Insurrection Act, a law allowing the president to use the US military on its own citizens, considered the game’s nuclear option.
That’s in part because of its potential for abuse in the wrong hands. The film notes that Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, personally implored Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to prevent the certification of Biden’s election, and promised that the Oath Keepers would support him if he did. “You must use the Insurrection Act and use the power of presidency to stop him. All us veterans will support you,” he wrote. Rhodes, a Yale-educated former paratrooper who founded the far-right group (including current and retired military personnel, law enforcement officers and first responders) in 2009, was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Capitol attack.
The 94-minute film also features interviews with game producers and participants on what motivated them to fight domestic extremism, and how seriously they view the country’s vulnerability to potentially violent, anti-democratic factions. All it takes is a “tiny fraction” of enlisted service people who believe “this conspiracy, this cult, this religion” to “pose a serious security threat”, says Goldsmith, who is particularly concerned about the recruitment of disillusioned, isolated veterans to far-right movements.
“Wishing that it’s just going to go away? It’s not going to happen,” says Linda L Singh, a retired major general of the Maryland army national guard, on extremist beliefs in the armed forces.
The film stresses that while a political coup attempt is by no means likely in the near future, it is important to remember that the US has no built-in immunity to one. The repeated message is: it can happen here. “Is it probable? Probably not,” says Heidi Heitkamp, a former senator from North Dakota playing a senior advisor to Bullock’s president. “Is it possible? Absolutely.”
War Game is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
licans have delayed signing onto a bill to nationally ban abortions.
“Our friends in the Republican party need to touch some grass,” said Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, the organization behind the summit. “Those who say now that we shouldn’t be talking, that Republican candidates, those seeking for office, should hide from the abortion issue – they continue to be wrong. We won’t win if we put our head in the sand.”
Democrats are already attempting to use Roe’s impact on doctors to win votes, as Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has launched a blitz of events and ads timed to the Roe anniversary on Monday. Vice-President Kamala Harris will kick off a tour devoting to spotlighting abortion access, while Biden will assemble a meeting of his reproductive health taskforce.
His administration has also announced plans to expand access to contraception under the Affordable Care Act as well as an initiative to spread information about a law that, the administration says, guarantees Americans’ legal rights to emergency abortions, even in states that ban the procedure.
A thin line
The mood on Saturday wasn’t totally dour.
Attendees could buy baseball caps that read “I’m just out here saving babies,” sweatshirts that bore an image of a newspaper front page that proclaimed “ROE REVERSED”, as well as red hats adorned with the words “Make America Pro-Life Again” in the unmistakable style of Trump’s Maga hats. Young people excitedly posed for group photos in front of a backdrop that read, “EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE PREBORN!” An illustrated fetus was curled up in one corner.
Yet, in speech after speech, activists told young people that they were the victims of vast forces arrayed against them. They accused abortion rights supporters of spreading misinformation about ballot referendums and said they were simply outspent by the opposition. In Ohio, abortion rights supporters reported receiving about three times as much money as a coalition that opposed abortion rights.
“These people love chaos. That is the left. The left is inherently chaotic at its core,” said Will Witt, a conservative influencer who, like Roberts, spoke at the morning address to all attendees.
After quoting from the Bible in an effort to demonstrate that God originated order, Witt continued: “This is why the left, this is why these prochoicers, this is why they hate God. Because God represents order in the world, whereas they love chaos.”
The summit speakers were attempting to walk a fine line. At the same time that they were attempting to convince attendees that they were the victims of a world turned against them, they also had to make the case that opposition to abortion is a majority view – and one issue that can get Republicans elected.
“Our opinion on this issue, the issue, is not outside of the mainstream, no matter how many times ABC wants to try to tell me it is,” Hawkins told attendees at a workshop dedicated to understanding what went wrong with the abortion referendums. Most millennials and members of Gen Z, she added, “want some sorts of limits on abortion”.
Polling on abortion is complex, since respondents’ answers can vary widely depending on how a question is asked or how much context is provided. Most Americans believe that abortion should be restricted after the first trimester of pregnancy, according to polling from Gallup. However, over the last two decades, more and more people have become open to keeping abortion legal later into pregnancy. Republicans in Virginia failed to take control of the state legislature last year after they ran on a promise of banning abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Gallup has also found that, since 2020, more Americans identify as “prochoice” than “pro-life”. More people have started to call themselves “prochoice” since the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.
Hawkins is not in favor of only “some sorts of limits on abortion”.
“I want to see no abortions be legal, ever,” she said in an interview. She rejected the notion that abortions performed to save women’s lives qualify as abortions. “When you’re looking at a case where a woman’s life is at risk, where the physician believes that she can no longer safely carry her child in her womb, or she may lose her life – we wouldn’t consider that an abortion unless the abortionist goes in with the intention to killing the child.”
Instead, she said, it’s a “maternalfetal separation”.
Hawkins’ point was an effort to contend with a phenomenon that has been particularly damaging for the movement: stories from women who have sued after they said they were denied medically necessary abortions.
Every state with an abortion ban has some kind of exception for cases of medical emergencies, but doctors in those states have widely said that the exceptions are so vague as to be unworkable. In a recent study of 54 OBGYNs in states with post-Roe abortion restrictions, more than 90% said that the law prevented them from adhering to the best clinical standards of care.
‘You vote pro-life’
Last year, when the National ProLife Summit held a straw poll asking attendees about their preferred 2024 president candidate, Ron DeSantis won. This year, with DeSantis a day away from dropping out of the presidential primary, Hawkins cheerfully proclaimed the latest straw poll victor: Donald Trump.
As much as their leaders may lock heads with Republicans or Trump – who has suggested that hardline abortion stances hurt Republicans – they are ultimately unlikely to withhold votes from the GOP. Even Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, who was a target of the January 6 riot and who spoke at the summit, indicated that people need to simply get on with it.
“That’s why we have primaries. We sort ’em out at every level. But after the primary’s over, you vote pro-life,” Pence said. “You go get behind men and women who are going to stand for the right to life.”
A booth for the Heritage Foundation was emblazoned with logos for its “Project 2025”, which includes a playbook for the next conservative president. It recommends that the US government stop funding or promoting abortion in international programs, turbocharge the government’s existing “surveillance” efforts to collect data about abortion, and enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion pills. That would effectively result in the removal of abortion pills from the market, which Hawkins said is a policy goal of hers.
“If Donald Trump would be elected again, the people he would appoint to his presidential administration would not be abortion activists,” Hawkins said in an interview. “Hands down, that’s a guarantee. And they’re going to be coming to Washington to protect the people and the people includes the preborn children.”