How America’s Elites Role-played Secession and #NationalDivorce
And Christians took notes...
In July 2020, as the United States simmered with political anxiety, a coterie of former officials, legal scholars, and policy veterans gathered under the aegis of the so-called Transition Integrity Project to role-play various post-election crises. This was not a fringe think tank or radical advocacy group. The participants were drawn from the highest strata of the American political class—former governors, national security officials, White House staffers, law professors, campaign veterans. They met not in basements or bunkers, but in Zoom rooms and executive suites. Their stated goal: to game out the fragile machinery of American democracy and test how it might fare under pressure.
One scenario, in particular, startled even seasoned observers: what if Donald J. Trump won reelection?
In this simulation, John Podesta—former White House Chief of Staff and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 failed presidential campaign—was assigned the role of Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic nominee for the presidency of the union. The fictional Trump eked out an Electoral College victory, and Podesta-as-Biden responded not with legal challenges or dignified concession, but with something far more jarring: he encouraged the governors of California, Oregon, and Washington to reject the results outright, to withhold their electors, and to secede unless Trump stepped down.
Let us pause here.
This was not a piece of satire. Not a Reddit thread. Not a militia cosplay. This was the political establishment of the United States—those who pride themselves on…