Election of 2020 reality v. war game (TIP 2)

Yesterday CNAV introduced the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), a worst-case scenario tournament designed to recommend how to get President Donald J. Trump out of the White House and out of public life as rapidly – and painlessly – as possible during and after the Election of 2020. The bedrock assumption of TIP was that President Trump must not be allowed a second term. If he got one, feared the Project directors, he might change his title from President to Leader (in German, Führer). Today CNAV examines one of the four war games TIP set up – the one having initial conditions closest to the official popular and electoral vote totals. CNAV will examine what TIP said would happen next, and compare it to what actually happened next.

General setup of the TIP Election of 2020 Games

All descriptions of game players, game set-up, and game play come from the Transition Integrity Project document.

The TIP directors required sixty-seven active players and “dozens more” observers, i.e., game judges. The Sixty-seven included:

members of both major political parties, former high-ranking government officials (including, for example, two former governors), senior political campaigners, nationally prominent journalists and communications professionals, social movement leaders, and experts on politics, national security, democratic reform, election law, and media.

Given how the games played out, the Sixty-seven cannot have included patriotic Americans or “MAGA Republicans.” If they included “members of both parties,” they included Democrats and RINOs. Furthermore, the Democrats among the Sixty-seven were radical Democrats, to whom Democrats could do no wrong and Trump no right.

The Project document’s description of the teams presents confusion. According to the document, the games played out among seven teams:

1. Team Trump,
2. Team Biden,
3. Republican elected officials (Team GOP),
4. Democratic elected officials (Team Dem),
5. Career federal government employees (civilian and military) and political appointees (Team FedGov),
6. Team Media, and
7. Team Public.

The “Public” Team consisted of “polling experts” as proxies for the public. In other words, they were working with yesterday’s data from their own samples, biased as they undoubtedly were.

Confusion, and bad assumptions

Two sources of confusion arise. First, the Project document says each team had two or three members. But that would allow only seventeen or eighteen total players, assuming about fifty-fifty distribution between two- and three-person teams. The putative division of sixty-seven players among seven teams begs explanation.

Second, the Project document says each player had “‘real-life’ experience” appropriate to the team on which they played. How could that apply to Team Trump? Can anyone imagine the Project directors, Democrats all, recruiting genuine Trump partisans to play on Team Trump? Or any Trump partisans agreeing to play, thus falling into a stupid, odious trap? Even to attempt to imagine such a thing, defies common sense.

The Project document then tells us each team could do whatever they wanted. A “White Cell” would judge success or failure of any given move – after hearing “robust argumentation among all teams.” That sounds much like “breaking the proscenium.” When all sides couldn’t agree, someone – presumably a White Cell member – literally rolled dice. In other words, TIP set up a tournament much like the popular role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.

Finally, the document tells us that never once did anyone try to “model or simulate legal strategy.” They modeled “political mobilization and media dynamics,” and the use of raw power to win.

The document leaves two things almost unspoken. First, the game rules permitted no showing of voter fraud. Second, the game assumes Trump and his family guilty of various venal shakedown schemes.

The Election of 2020 game

CNAV uses Federal Election Commission numbers as the closest to an authoritative source.

The Electoral College fell out with 306 votes for Biden and 232 for Trump. Popular votes totaled 81.3 million for Biden and 74.2 million for Trump, to three significant digits. Thus Biden won the popular vote (according to the FEC) with a 4.6 percent lead.

TIP Games Two and Four were the only two that had Biden winning. Game Four had Biden leading the popular vote by less than 1 percent, and finishing with 278 electoral votes. Therefore, Game Two best fits the actual outcome. The accuracy of certification of vote totals by the several States, and the District of Columbia, is another debate. Remember: the game rules permitted no showing of voter fraud.

So how did the game play out? The TIP document tells us that Teams Trump and GOP alleged fraud. Team Trump then called for joint investigations of all elections by the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice. They called on Team Media to air their suspicions of fraud, but never once called on State legislatures to intervene.

Next – again per the war game – Team Trump relocated Trump and his staff to Mar-A-Lago and “pursu[ed] murky business deals.” Never once did the document elaborate.

The Senate convened almost at once and held marathon sessions to “push through” judicial nominations. Then Team Trump prepared pardons for anyone connected with the administration, “regardless of admitted or perceived guilt.”

Securing the transition

Team Biden, meanwhile, “secured” their election result and built some coalitions with some Republican officials. (White Cell rolled the dice and granted some coalitions, but not others.) They forged an “Election Protection Coalition” to stop the investigations, and even tried to persuade Republican electors to switch votes. But White Cell did not allow this. This was another thing, other than a “showing of fraud,” that the game rules did not permit.

After that (“Turns Two and Three”), Team Biden concentrated on transition, with help from Team FedGov. Team Trump pardoned “Trump family members, political allies, and cabinet officials,” and also pardoned Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton. Next, Team Trump set up MAGA TV, which the document did not describe further. It would likely have been a streaming service, with “apps” available for smartphones and the Roku API. (CNAV doubts that the LG or “Life’s Good” API managers would have allowed a MAGA TV app. The LG library is severely limited, while the Roku library is vast by its managers’ design.) Trump’s primary mission would have been to place himself or his son Donald Jr. as the Republican candidate in 2024.

Team Biden finished the transition and concentrated on governing. Team Dem led the charge to investigate Trump and his family. Finally, Team GOP concentrated on State responses to the coronavirus “pandemic.” Trump political appointees all left the federal government.

How the Election of 2020 really played out

In actual fact, Trump assumed from the outset that fraud had decided at least six, possibly seven, State “carries.” They were, of course, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and possibly Minnesota. Trump or Biden “carried” every other State as Republican or Democratic candidates carried them in the last several elections.

But neither the DNI nor the DOJ ever investigated any States. For that, blame Trump’s lack of imagination and poor judgment in selection of officials. Many of these officials, most notably then-Attorney General William Barr, spoke of their “crises of conscience” in dealing with Trump. Trump did have his own cadre of lawyers, who tried – in vain – either to encourage the proper authorities to investigate, or to pursue judicial remedies. As everyone remembers, sixty cases came to court, only to have the judges dismiss them all for lack of standing. In other words, the judges decided that a losing candidate has no right to contest an election. Never once did any court find, on the merits, that any given election fell out as it should have.

Trump remained in the White House until his last day in office. He then transported boxes of documents to Mar-A-Lago and had them safely offloaded from Air Force One and installed in his Florida residence before noon that day. Readers should remember that in subsequent discussions of Game Four and other games. (They have Trump burning documents, a thing he never did or contemplated.)

Trump stakes his all on Pence

Never did anyone convene the Senate to start rushing through judicial nominations, or for any other reason. Nor did Trump prepare any raft of pardons. Preparing a raft of pardons would have suggested consciousness of guilt, a thing Trump still does not have.

Trump staked all his hopes on Vice-President Pence refusing to certify results from Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, or Nevada. Had Pence done so, the House of Representatives would have elected Trump with a majority of State delegations.

How the Senate would have voted, none can guess. The key people in the Senate would have been Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). What follows is a CNAV scenario of calling a Vice-Presidential election in the Senate. The Senate Democratic Caucus, including newly minted Senators Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff (both D-Ga.), would absent itself en masse. Whereupon Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) would have issued an immediate call to quorum. If Sens. Sinema and Manchin voted for Pence, the result would be a tie – and Pence would be the tiebreaker.

But, of course, none of these things happened. Instead, Pence betrayed Trump – and he does not convince CNAV with his talk of “upholding the Constitution.”

January 6 and its aftermath

Trump called a rally on the National Mall on January 6. Two hundred attendees, following the lead of men like Ray Epps, entered the Capitol. With the result we all know.

Trump never got his MAGA TV station, though he did build Truth Social. Twitter, of course, banned Trump on January 8. Amazon Web Services threw the Parler platform off its servers after they gave Donald Trump an account. The Censorship Industrial Complex went into full gear. Though Yoel Roth, former chief moderator at Twitter, denies this, The Intercept famously celebrated it.

Conclusion

One can readily see that the Transition Integrity Project played out this game with no understanding of Trump, his associates, or his voters. They assumed:

1. Guilt on the part of Trump and his family of venal shakedowns and an attempt to make Trump Leader (Führer),
2. Fanaticism, and despair of the outcome, on the part of the Senate Republican Conference, and, of course,
3. Absolute and unquestionable probity in the conduct of American elections.

Absolutely none of these assumptions turns out to be safe. The Senate Republican Conference turns out to be made of very weak stuff. Moreover, the Republican Party is badly split between true Republicans and RINOs. Elections in the United States today are a mess, and the mess is due to electronic voting machines. (To say nothing of the spectacle of using temporary help placement agencies to provide Officers of Election in some jurisdictions.)

On the other hand, the federal government did not see a mass exodus of Trump appointees. Certainly the judiciary saw no such exodus. True, the Supreme Court refused to hear Texas’ challenge to the disputed Presidential electors. But that Court went on to produce the most breathtaking restorations of basic freedom in its history. Likewise, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana (Monroe Division) has proved a real hero of the First Amendment in his handling of Missouri v. Biden.

Looking ahead

Future installments will examine the other three Games, which suggest even further failures of understanding of reality by the TIP.