Alex Burns for Politico:
Weeks before the 2020 election, a secret 87-page document outlined in matter-of-fact language the threat posed by Donald Trump’s still-to-come campaign of election denial. The private paper — the existence of which has not been reported before — forecast with chilling confidence the likelihood of violence during the presidential handover and proposed a far-reaching set of political reforms to thwart Trumpism in the future.
Americans remember that dark winter well. But the impetus for structural change has faded, even among Democrats who still privately seethe about the country’s broken political system — and fear an uglier meltdown could come in 2024 or beyond.
The report carried a plain title: Plan D. Reading it, I wondered if the D stood for “doomsday.”
Actually, the letter was not a cipher. Plan D was the fourth of several studies organized by an opaque advocacy group, known as the Hub, to prepare for the depredations of the Trump era. The Hub is known in Washington for its sophisticated dark-money interventions in electoral politics. During the 2020 campaign, it also gathered up strategists, lawyers and activists to draft plans for a different kind of conflict.
The document is an artifact from a dangerous time: Warning that Trump would surely not concede defeat to Joe Biden, it advised Trump’s opponents to “assume the worst” would follow. It urged them to gird for a struggle not only with the president but with “institutions controlled or influenced by the GOP, including the courts.” The document forecast “militia and white supremacist activities through the inauguration — and, very likely, accelerated activity in the early months of a Biden administration.”
Plan D is sobering reading even today. It is a catalog of the defects in America’s electoral process and political culture that made it vulnerable to a rampaging demagogue— defects that some Democrats wanted to fix with drastic measures.
Should Biden lose narrowly, the report said, “layers of illegitimate structures and interventions will have contributed to it.” It closed with a warning against complacency even if Trump were to be defeated.
“A Biden win will not prove that our democracy is healthy,” the document argued, continuing: “Win, lose, or draw, we should perceive ourselves not in a singular moment of crisis but rather in what may be an era of existential challenge for American democracy.”
I first read the report soon after it was composed, when a source shared it as an off-the-record analysis to inform my thinking about 2020. At the time, I thought it was a creative assessment of potential worst-case scenarios, some of which struck me as rather remote. The January 6 insurrection was still months away.
In any event, I found Plan D more compelling than contemporaneous Democratic planning exercises that seemed more like high-concept role play for political elites. My colleague Sam Stein, then at The Daily Beast, reported on one “simulation” that foresaw the Biden campaign urging the entire West Coast to secede in a unit known as “Cascadia.” Simulation indeed.
Plan D was no game. It was devised as a battle plan. Reviewing the report years later, it is impossible not to be struck by the sense of urgency in the text — and the speed with which the impatient demand for fundamental change to American politics has dissipated among most Democrats….