The makers of “War Game” have taken their documentary on the road over the past few months, with screenings in Michigan, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
“I’ve been polling audiences, and they’re pretty evenly split on whether or not the president should invoke the Insurrection Act to quell this uprising,” says co-director Jesse Moss.
He’s talking about a simulated uprising, not a real one. But you can see the sweat on Steve Bullock’s brow as he plays a president with an election-denying opponent, and you can hear the edge in Heidi Heitkamp’s voice as she pretends to advise him.
These players are convincing in their roles; Bullock was once the governor of Montana, Heitkamp was a senator from North Dakota, and they are joined by other former officials from across the government, hoping that by gaming out a worst-case scenario they can learn how to prevent it.
“As soon as we hit go on that big red button and the countdown began, they were in it 100 percent,” says Janessa Goldbeck, whose nonprofit Vet Voice Foundation organized the exercise.
Moss and Goldbeck sat down with Political Theater this month to imagine “the country’s worst day.” This transcript has been edited and condensed. For the full conversation, listen here. “War Game” is available on various platforms.
Q: What gave you the idea for this project?
Jesse Moss: The movie is about a war game conducted by Janessa’s organization that contemplates the next insurrection on Jan. 6, 2025. So it’s a documentary about the future — which is kind of a paradox, but that excited me.
It’s inspired by an op-ed in The Washington Post by three retired generals, who said we need to look at the possibility that the next disputed election could result in political violence and be worse than what we experienced in 2021.
Janessa Goldbeck: In particular, they were talking about the concern you could have active-duty members of the military or National Guard participating in a future insurrection. We know that many of the defendants in the Jan. 6 cases were veterans.
So that’s really what got our wheels turning. And we thought, we’ve got this incredible network of former policymakers and retired military and security experts, why don’t we bring them together and game this out in a tabletop or a war game?
Vet Voice Foundation is a 501(c) nonpartisan nonprofit organization. We represent about a million and a half veterans and military family members across the country, and our mission is to elevate their voices in our democracy.
Q: You convinced a lot of people to do it. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark plays the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, and former Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama is attorney general.
JM: It wasn’t until the cameras started rolling and this real-time exercise started, with an 80-person crew, that we knew whether this would be interesting to watch. And I have to say, it was transfixing from moment one.
We knew some of these people were charismatic, like Wes Clark or Steve Bullock. But this makes you feel like you’re in the room. We’ve had a lot of postmortems on Jan. 6, 2021, and really good documentaries and journalism and the Jan. 6 select committee, but I think we need new ways to talk about what the legacy of those events are.
Q: Some of the players still have a political future ahead of them. Were they worried about doing this on camera?
JG: This took quite a bit of courage from all the participants. They were agreeing to appear on camera for an unscripted exercise, but also the subject matter has become so polarizing in this country, to talk about extremism within the active-duty forces.
I think maybe people assumed it would be three guys with tripods in a windowless conference room, but what they actually walked into on Jan. 6, 2023, when we shot this, was an incredible set that Jesse and his team put together. It really felt like the White House Situation Room.
Q: The cameras also follow around some fictional insurrectionists.
JM: Janessa recruited Marine and Army veterans to portray an opposition force called the Order of Columbus. It’s entirely fictional but recognizable to viewers, I think, as [similar to] the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and various other extremist factions.
And the guys who Janessa brought in are incredibly compelling. They have investigated extremist movements now, since their service, and this is important work for them. When we meet them in the film, they’re actually scouting Capitol Hill for its tactical weaknesses.
Q: What were some lessons learned?
JG: One of our really big takeaways from the exercise itself was how important it is for local leaders, state leaders, governors, secretaries of state, AGs, to understand the Insurrection Act.
When we created this scenario and when we shot the film, we didn’t know that the far-right flank of this country was going to recommend the use of the Insurrection Act by a future President Trump to police cities and states of political rivals, to deploy active-duty military forces into places like Chicago and Arizona, and to deport people who are supposedly here illegally. Those are massive breaks from what we’ve come to expect in terms of civil-military relations in this country.
[At the time] we wanted to tease out the Insurrection Act and what would happen if a president employed it — in this case, a president who’s trying to quell a political insurrection but potentially has forces who are disloyal in the National Guard. But I think it’s even more relevant now than when we filmed.
JM: What we see in the film is there’s no easy answer for our fictional president to determine what to do, [as the] insurrection spreads around the country, moving beyond the U.S. Capitol to the state of Arizona and other places. Ultimately, the film leaves audiences with that question.
Our role-players, who are pretty busy folks, have been totally committed to being a part of the public conversation around this film, from our premiere at Sundance through our theatrical release, which is ongoing and started in early August.
We’ve had screenings in many American cities, on college campuses and in swing states, and some of those are with people like Gov. Bullock, Sen. Heitkamp or [game consultant] Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. And the conversations with audiences have been, to me, some of the most rewarding parts of this journey.
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