Last week, I attended the San Francisco premier of the documentary War Game. The film—which I should note is codirected by a close friend of mine, Jesse Moss—follows an exercise conducted by a veterans’ group named Vet Voice Foundation (VVF). In the scenario they game out, a presidential candidate refuses to accept the 2024 election results. With the support of a few authoritarian-minded generals, the hypothetical candidate activates paramilitary groups, as well as breakaway units within the Army and state National Guard units, to prevent Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote and to take over capitols in key swing states. In this scenario, savvy social media denizens, an entirely amoral presidential candidate, and a handful of top military brass convinced that their iron fist is being wielded at the behest of God, are able to hugely amplify their impact and compromise the chain of command, essentially through a sophisticated use of information warfare against the federal government and its beleaguered, insular, president.

The situation envisaged in the one-and-a-half-hour long War Game is, of course, a souped-up version of what Trump and his insurrection-minded acolytes unleashed on January 6, 2021. And its premise—that Trump will try something similar or worse after the November election—worries enough senior figures in the political and military worlds that VVF had no problem attracting a who’s who of people to role-play the president, his senior advisers, and his top cabinet and military officials during the six-hour war game they undertook. Other groups, too, such as the Brennan Center for Justice have been quietly gaming out similar scenarios over the past few months, concerned both that Trump and his followers won’t accept an electoral defeat and that if he wins he will unleash the Insurrection Act against his opponents. Earlier this year, the Brennan Center hired top political journalist Barton Gelman to help develop safeguards—from legal strategies to public education campaigns to reminding members of the military that they have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution—against Trumpist attacks on the constitutional order.

I won’t spoil War Game’s ending here, but, suffice it to say, the film ought to serve as a wake-up call to those who think that Trump and the MAGA movement have shouted their last hurrahs when it comes to efforts to sabotage the democratic process.

I asked VVF CEO Janessa Goldbeck and Jesse Moss their thoughts, based on what they had seen while making War Game, about ongoing vulnerabilities to the democratic process and the peaceful resolution of post-election conflicts. With only two months to go until the election, their answers were sobering.

Goldbeck worried about the viral spread of mis- and disinformation, pointing to Trump’s recent use of social media to repost AI-generated images of Taylor Swift fans endorsing him and of Kamala Harris dressed in a Soviet uniform. “He’s been leaning into it and amplifying it,” Goldbeck said. She is further concerned by Trump’s repeated refusal to unequivocally state that he will abide by an election result in which he loses; by local, hard-right GOP efforts to take over traditionally nonpartisan election administration committees, presumably in an effort to snarl up certification of unfavorable election results; and by the GOP filing multiple lawsuits in key swing states to challenge ballot deadlines for mailed–in ballots. In Nevada, current law states that those envelopes have to be postmarked by Election Day, but the GOP wants to change the law to count only ballots received by Election Day. “It’s important to be able to speak frankly about the challenges facing us,” she says. “Any presidential candidate who refuses to commit to the peaceful transfer of power deserves to be called out. It’s a massive break from what we are used to seeing when it comes to elections in this country.”

For Moss, his film made him think about the dangers of what he refers to as “normalcy bias,” which might be roughly translated into the soothing notion that “it can’t happen here.” We assume, because we have lived under a broadly democratic umbrella for so long, that we will always live that way. “Our collective unwillingness or inability to confront the risks we are facing,” is particularly dangerous at this moment in US history, Moss says, when Trump seems willing “to provoke something worse than what we saw on January 6, 2021.”

Trump has shown, over and over again, that he is at his most dangerous and feral when he is backed into a corner. Behind in most polls, he faces the very real possibility of losing in November. Should he do so, it’s not at all beyond the bounds of the possible that he will seek to foment a January 6 redux. And this time around, his Trumpified political party might just try to back him up.