Radiolab - What If?

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

There’s plenty of speculation about what Donald Trump might do in the wake of the election. Would he dispute the results if he loses? Would he simply refuse to leave office, or even try to use the military to maintain control? Last summer, Rosa Brooks got together a team of experts and political operatives from both sides of the aisle to ask a slightly different question. Rather than arguing about whether he’d do those things, they dug into what exactly would happen if he did. Part war game part choose your own adventure, Rosa’s Transition Integrity Project doesn’t give us any predictions, and it isn’t a referendum on Trump. Instead, it’s a deeply illuminating stress test on our laws, our institutions, and on the commitment to democracy written into the constitution. This episode was reported by Bethel Habte, with help from Tracie Hunte, and produced by Bethel Habte. Jeremy Bloom provided original music. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.     You can read The Transition Integrity Project’s report here.

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Okay. We're going to start with a timely thought provoking. Interesting conversation that reporter Bethel Hopte and I got into a few months ago. All right. I was wondering if you could introduce yourself. My name is, et cetera, et cetera. And what a however you'd like to be identified. My name is Rosa Brookes. I'm a law professor at Georgetown University.

I spent several years working at the Defense Department during the Obama administration and could say more of it. Suffice, say Rosa is pretty well connected in DC political circles. And the reason we called her up is because this past summer, she found herself at the center of a kind of political choose your own adventure. Well, I started thinking about this sometime last autumn. This was 2019. I was at a dinner.

One of those Washington DC inside the Beltway dinners where everybody's wearing named tags and they're dinner speakers and you know you're eating bad chicken. And I was sitting next to a federal appellate court judge and various fancy DC lawyers and we started chatting about Donald Trump which is what people chat about of course. And I said, you know, gosh, you know, what if Trump loses and he won't step down? Will you commit to making sure that there is a peaceful transfer of power after the election? I won't leave. We want to have Get rid of the ballots and you'll have a very peaceful,

there won't be a transfer, frankly, there'll be a continuation. And the judge said, oh, that would never happen. The military would never let that happen. And I sort of thought, wait, wait, what? The military would never let that happen. What do you mean by that? Rosa knew the military. So I mean, I'm married to a retired Army Special Forces officer.

I spent several years working at the Pentagon. So she was sitting there looking at this guy thinking, what's behind that assumption? When you say the military would never let it happen? What exactly do you mean? You know, the military has a million and a half people, they're stationed all over the way. Who do you think is giving what order that makes you? Oh, were you like thinking, were you sitting there thinking about the chain of command

and mapping it out? Like, oh, this person would have to talk to this person and then I guess they'd have to talk to that person. Yeah, no, I'm sitting everybody else sort of chattering away and I'm kind of sitting there thinking, wait a minute. Wait, wait. And we all changed the subject because this was nearly a year ago and I realized I was sort of sounding like a crazy person. This sort of casual dinner chat was long before Trump made the famous statements about how he

might not commit to a peaceful transition of power. But there was something about that dinner, and that guy next to her's response, the combination of certainty and vagueness. Just got her thinking, if a president did decide to go away off the grid and do something like not leave What would happen? Like what specifically would happen just sitting alone in my spare time thinking about okay So that happens. Well then what will that happen? So then what will if you make this choice what happens? You know, the choose your own adventure book

This sort of you know if you decide to start through the dark jungle path, turn to page 37. If you decide to stay in the sunny clearing by a tiger. So Rosa starts thinking about all this, spinning out on the what ifs. At some point, she ends up on the phone with a colleague of hers, Nils Gilman, who works at the Bergruin Institute. And so I told Nils this, I've been thinking about ways to really explore these branching pathways. And Nils said, that's a great idea. To them decide, maybe we should do a war game. You know, and the military does them all the time on issues like,

gee, you know, if we had to fight two conflicts at once, would we be able to or what would happen if Iran did such and such, would we be able to respond effectively? They thought maybe we should just do that around the possibility of a disrupted election. So they made a bunch of calls to a bunch of people who have been in those kind of rooms. People who had experience that was similar,

so John Podesta, who obviously has worked on multiple Democratic presidential campaigns and Michael Steele on the GOP side, former chair of the RNC. They got generals, lobbyists, think tankers, people in the media, 67 people in all, gathered them all together and divided them into teams. We had a Biden campaign team, a Trump campaign team, we had a GOP elected officials team, the Democratic elected officials team,

a media team, a team of career public servants. And the idea very simply was that they would present all of these teams a scenario and then they'd watch the teams respond. How's this? I just switched to the near puzzle, which I actually find to be better. Yeah, it's going and when I hit the mic

It's going off the charts amazing. We got so into this game that we ended up talking to about 20 of the different players My name is Matthew Sanderson Republican election attorney power to Penske I'm managing director of s3 group of communications and government relations firm. I spent decades in Republican politics And now these meetings all went down last summer, June 2020, pandemic in full swing. So the war games, you know, we were all on the screen together. We're on Zoom.

We had a live Zoom chat going. That's a Roger Goyle, former state representative of Kansas. It was, um, hi, how are you, sort of stuff. Robert Rabin, former assistant attorney general. Then there's the gossip and who had a baby. Anyhow, there was some friendly chat.

Some people coming off an on video, including myself when I had to go take care of my kids or something like that. People started off kind of cheery kind of thinking, oh, this is kind of fun. You know, this is a game. It's a game. And then of course, they got bored

because we gave them half an hour of game instructions. So we had three minutes for this. And we had five minutes for this. That was very complicated. It's a game and then of course they got bored because we gave them half an hour of game instructions So we have three minutes for this and we have five minutes for this. I was very complicated And then we're gonna put on a green shoe and then everybody's gonna turn around twice And then it's a breakout room. There was a lot of weight what you know You definitely needed to stay alert and stay on your toes or else you would have missed something But the essential rule sort of the gist of it was pretty simple You know your job is to pursue what you perceive as your interests.

And we're not going to define them for you. That's your job. Each player was supposed to act the way that they thought the people who they were on the team of, what act? No, you can't do things like say, you know, there was just a nuclear attack from China or something. But you can spread rumors, you can make allegations, you can just to make sure things didn't

ever get too implausible. After every move, Rosa actually had a team of people she called the White Cell, which were lawyers, experts, people who could look at each move and evaluate whether it was realistic and could happen. And to some extent, that's a probabilistic call. We literally had a 10-sided die that we rolled. Oh my God, D&D flashbacks. Wow.

OK. Anyhow, after everybody was in the Zoom room and Chit Chat was over and everybody knew the rules, Rosa and her team would lay out a scenario. You know, it's two in the morning on election night or whatever, and here is what we know so far. Go, and then the teams took turns. We gave the Trump team first turn, and then the Biden team did a turn, and then we went

to the elected officials and so on down the line in each round. Meanwhile with each move, the media teams are covering what's happening. Fox News says such and such. The New York Times editorial board denounces this. Social media rumors spread on Twitter that such and such is happening. And what happened is that in each of the games,

things got worse than we expected faster than we expected. And the mood kind of shifted to a little bit shocked and in all of the games we kind of called them early. Okay, you know, let's just let's stop now and let's talk about what just happened and let's end Rosa and her diverse group of powerful people ran four different games. Game 1 and Biggay was result. Game 2, Clear Biden victory. Each one exploring a different games. Game one, and Biggay was result. Game two, clear Biden victory. Each one exploring a different outcome. Game three, clear Trump win, game four,

a narrow Biden win. And then she and her team wrote a report detailing. Trump campaign team asked the Department of Justice. What happened in each of those games? The Biden campaign quickly dispelled this information, but Facebook kept posts about the heart attack. These are not predictions at all. The purpose of this was let's do some more rigorous thinking about the what ifs. And honestly, when we talked to the people who played in these games, it was immediately clear that this wasn't actually about Trump at all.

I mean, obviously the fact that he ignores political norms and doesn't says whatever he wants, kicked the whole thing off, but right away it was clear that what was being revealed here was something about the deep nature of our laws and our institutions and really us. So a lot of a lot of these games sort of start in one place and then start to poke at all the same things. Now, we're not going to play all four scenarios in full, but there were things that popped up in several of the scenarios that are definitely worth highlighting. We're going to focus mostly on the first one. Game 1. Ambiguous result.

The Ambiguous result scenario. There what you had is what many people predict will happen. The first game investigated a scenario in which the outcome of the election remained unclear from election night and throughout gameplay. The election outcome turned on results of three states, North Carolina, Michigan, and Florida. Three swing states. Oh, and one thing I think it's important to say before we launch in, everyone we talk to told us that when it comes to the actual election that's about to happen, it's certainly

unlikely to be over on election night. We're going to need to adjust our expectations about time. People regularly refer to this as election day, but you have many, many, many ballots that aren't even counted yet. That's Howard Opinski and Matthew Sanderson. I think you should start thinking about this as an election quarter. I would anticipate that this process will take about three months to fully play out. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Okay, scenario one ambiguous result. This is scenario where it is not clear for a while who is one. As we mentioned, the game consists of each of the different teams taking a series of turns.

Turn 1. November 3rd to November 10th. The Trump campaign began the game by calling on Biden to concede based on the election night in-person voting returns. In this scenario, early results of in-person voting skewed toward President Trump and the GOP. Which again, many toward President Trump and the GOP. Which, again, many people predict will be the case. And he's like, let's call it where I want, where we should move on now.

The Trump campaign also used the bully pulpit of the presidency and its influence with right-wing media to lock in the election night returns. So we can imagine 9 p.m. election night and Inc. Hermite DeClaire. Donald Trump will be President of the United States Trump officials call into question mail in ballots or the legitimacy of post-election day vote counts and Enlist the support of Republican officials in several states to immediately halt further vote counting

So Trump declares victory tries to get the vote count stopped. The Biden campaign says, whoa, whoa, whoa. The Biden campaign calls for every vote to be counted. What about the millions of mail-in ballots? Mail-in sources have to be counted by hand. And depending on when people mail those in, they come in at different times. Most people don't remember that in 2008, it took Missouri a long time to declare whether John McCain won or Barack Obama won. That's election law professor Edward Foley. He says it took two weeks and those later votes

tend to shift blue. That's the working assumption of election and polling experts. It's been a trend for the last two decades. A blue shift. We only asked a question. Why is it that that happens? I mean, why wouldn't later vote shift red rather than blue? The reasoning for that is kind of sketchy. There isn't clear political science around why that happens. One of the reasons is the main reason you'd use a provisionary ballot is if you've changed addresses in the last year and a lot more

Democrats, I guess, move around or not homeowners. Oh, so it's socioeconomic. More Democrats are renters so they move around, don't have a consistent polling place so they do the mail-in. Yeah, that's the thinking. Oh, that's interesting. I did not know that. Okay, so back in the scenario, officially results are ambiguous, but Trump declares victory and Biden anticipating a blue shift says, keep counting counting, eventually he declares that he will win. GOP elected officials publicly supported Trump's victory and claims of voter fraud. Democratic elected officials were proactive in the states where they held offices to ensure votes would be counted and to build bipartisan coalitions to oversee

and protect the count. Attorney General Barr instructed the DOJ to support litigation that would prevent further counting of mail-in ballots. Okay, so far, if you ask me, no huge surprises yet, but this was actually just the first turn from each team. Turn two and three. The Trump campaign team attempted to federalize the National Guard to end further vote counting and called on supporters to turn out in large numbers. The Biden campaign established a bipartisan transition team and mobilized supporters to ensure vote counting

was completed thoroughly. So at this point in the game played both campaigns call for supporters to get out in the streets, protest, protest, protest, again, not a huge surprise, but then something very weird goes down. There was a moment where I almost needed to take a break from the game for a minute because it was so unsettling. This is Alan Davidson, senior advisor at Mozilla. In the middle of that chaos, there was a moment of clarity that we could all see a path

for how the Trump team could actually sway the election in their favor. He's talking specifically about this move. Turn 3. Officials from both parties sought to block or overturn results in key states, including seeking to use friendly state legislatures and governors to send alternate or additional sets of electors. So this is the first baller move. Robert Raven again. I mean, this is where we're in uncharted territory. And Raj Goyle. We do act as if somehow this is where we're in uncharted territory. Um, and Raj Goyle. We do act as if somehow this is incredibly unprecedented. These political, these political power plays happen.

Okay, so the baller move in question, trying to get a state to send an alternate set of lectures. Initially, it was a little bit hard for us to wrap our brains around, but let me take in stages. The first thing to really stare at is the electoral college. Like the easy to gloss over fact is that we don't vote directly for president. We, when a voter in say Nevada pulls the lever for Joe Biden They're really just voting to send a small group of people Nevada electors to the electoral college and it's those people who vote for Joe Biden. Well The way that the electoral college works is that actual human beings vote in the electoral college

So a human being actually is an electoral and votes the vote of that state's electoral vote, but they're human beings and so they have their own mind. So what they can do is they can not abide by the vote of their state. Really? And they can actually then in the sense become a faithless elector and do what they want,

despite the fact that they are bound by the results of that state. Just look at 2016, Trump v. Clinton. You know, what happened is that actually it looks like in Hawaii, there was a faithless elector in two faithless elector is in Texas Texas and then four in Washington state. These are seven people who just freelance? Basically, they were just like, I'm going to go my own way.

So I'm just looking at it right here. The Hawaii Faithless Elector Voter for Bernie in Texas. They voted for one voter for Kasek, one voter for Ron Paul. So those would probably be never trumpers. Obviously, the Hawaii electorum must have been an anti-hillary person and it was pro-Bernie. And then in Washington state, three of these electors voted for Colin Powell. What? And then a fourth voted for a Native American candidate, faith spotted eagle.

It gets a little bit nuanced. Now in one of the war game scenarios, the idea of trying to influence one of the electors to make them faithless, it did come up. But it wasn't allowed. And the Supreme Court has just literally a few months ago ruled that electors can't do that. But then both campaigns tried a different tact to influence the electors.

That turns out is way more powerful and very much allowed. See, these electors are not actually accountable to the voters. They're technically appointed by each state. The only reason we have the system we have now is that back in the day, each state, somewhere along the way, decided that electors should be connected to the popular vote, but that's a decision each state made. And it's a decision they can make at any time. So what happened in game scenario one is this, there was chaos.

As we mentioned, competing news reports, competing claims of victory, the Trump campaign then used that chaos to go directly to the state legislators and say, hey, given all this chaos, all this uncertainty, we think that you should... Just trust the popular vote. That the popular vote failed. That it was just untrustworthy because of this blue shift and it just who knows and we just can't trust it. It could be fraud, it could be rigged, it could be not, we just can't trust it. That's Edward Foley again. He was actually on Rosa's team of experts that decided what was plausible

or possible or not. And he says if the Trump campaign could make the argument that the popular vote can't be trusted, well then they can urge the state legislatures to throw out the electors and appoint their own. Why is it that state legislatures are allowed to send alternate or additional slates of electors? Yeah, so it goes back to this old provision in the Constitution Supreme Law of the Land that has never been changed. We said state legislatures can determine the manner of appointing electors, so they get to decide

whether we have these popular votes or the legislature's appoint electors directly or some other method. What can happen is the state legislature could say we can't trust the popular vote anymore because who knows who really won. So we're just going to appoint electors ourselves. This was something that the Florida legislature considered back in 2000, decided not to do it once Vice President Gore considered defeat, but it is a plausible move under Article 2 of the Constitution. Now in the war game scenario we've been following as we mentioned both teams tried to do this convinced state legislatures to totally swap out electors. But when Ed and the rest of Rosa's white cell team slapped a probability of success

under these moves and then had the teams roll the dice. After dice rolls, most of these efforts failed. But that's not to say that things got any less weird because at this point in the game as the teams are pressuring elected officials and giving competing press conferences It was clear that Michigan was going to be the deciding state. There a rogue Individual destroyed a large number of ballots believed to have supported Biden, leaving Trump a narrow electoral win. Now, what was that?

Was that part of the scenario that you guys set up or was that one of the moves that one of the teams made, the Trump team, I guess? That was actually something that the player teams generated. I believe in the scenario itself, it was a National Guard major decided to destroy a truckload of mail-in ballots. And the Trump team, if I'm recalling correctly, left it a little bit deliberately ambiguous. Hey, it's a rogue National Guard Major. He acted on his own initiative, wink, wink.

It's funny. This is one of those moments in the game where I thought, that's not going to happen. Wait, could that happen? Think about the June protests in Washington. And so one of the things that happened in DC was that an army helicopter, U.S. Army markings flew very, very low over city streets dispersing crowds. There was later a Pentagon inquiry into who the hell was that? She says in the end there's no way to know whether this was a coordinated action or just one guy having a bad idea.

So she says it's very plausible that a single human could have that kind of influence. And because in the scenario of this destruction of balances happening in Michigan, you now had a democratic governor step in and say, Hey, this is not okay. The governor of Michigan used this abnormality as justification to send a separate pro-biden set of electors to DC. So in the end, what you have is the deciding swing state Michigan offering up two separate results. The Republican state legislature sends a slate of electors that says Trump wins. The governor of Michigan sends a slate of electors that says Biden wins. That's how you would get these two competing submissions going to Congress.

At Foley says not only is this allowed under state law, it's actually happened before. The scenario I'm imagining looks like exactly what happened back in the disputed election of 1876 where you simultaneously had both teams of electors claiming to be the lawful electors both meeting on the same date. So back then it was the Hayes electors meeting. And one room and the Tilden electors meeting in a different room, the imaginary scenario that we're hypothesizing now is that the Biden electors would meet on December 14th and claim the authority to meet from the Secretary of State. And they would vote for Biden. On the same day,

the Trump electors would meet claiming the authority to meet from the state legislature, which is purported to directly appoint them. What the hell happens then? Congress would have to deal with it. The outcome of the scenario hinged on how the elected officials from the two parties addressed the separate slate of electors from Michigan. Wait, so this is this process, this referring process that Congress now has to do? Is that written down in the constitution?

Like yeah, so this is actually just the count of the electors. What does it say? Wherever it's written. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, in the 12th Amendment, which I have an tab here among thousands of tabs. The 12th Amendment to the Constitution says that Congress has a joint session. So it's both the House of Representatives and the Senate meeting together.

It's kind of like a state of the Union address. And the presiding officer is the president of the Senate, which is the vice president of the United States. And then there is a statute called the ElectroCount Act. And the statute says you take Congress this joint session. First of all, it says it's January 6th, so we know the date. We know it's 1 p.m. So it's quite choreographed.

If you read the relevant provisions of the U.S. code, there are some things that are very specific, including the speaker of the house sits right next to the president of the Senate. But the president of the Senate gets to sit in the speaker's chair because the...I mean, it's that detail. But when it comes to the pivotal question, the pivotal question, all we get is a little clause in the 12th Amendment. It says the president of the Senate opens the submissions that come from the states and then uses the passive voice. It says the vote shall be counted.

And the votes shall then be counted. The president, Senate shall and the presence of Senate of the Senate and House representatives open. So that's modifying the president of the Senate. So the vice president opens the envelopes, opens all the certificates. Okay. And the votes shall then be counted. By who? It does not say. It doesn't, the Constitution doesn't say.

What? The, the risk there is what if the US Senate wants to count one submission and the US House of Representatives wants to count the other? That's the real problem. How do you break that tie? GOP officials asserted that as the president of the Senate, Vice President Pence could legally choose to accept or reject electors as he wished.

The argument has been made historically that the 12th Amendment gives the Vice President that kind of prerogative, even if the Vice President is a candidate in the very election that we're talking about. I mean, the electoral count act that was adopted in 1887, I think is correct to say, was adopted on the premise that it should not be the Vice President who gets to make a decisive determination of which votes get counted, that this should be a congressional process, but that could be contested potentially in a real antagonistic

fight. There's this ambiguity, there's this huge hole where like something something that I've never thought about, I don't think a lot of people have thought about could actually happen. And what's so crazy about this is like, as of press time, I don't know, today our managing editor, Soren, had sent us this magazine article from the Atlantic that says, according to sources in the Republican Party, at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.

So they're actually thinking about this. Hi, this is Karen from Health Ontario. Radio Lab is supported by the Alfred T. Sloan Foundation, and has some public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.slown.org Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. This is Radio Lab, I'm Chad Abumarhan. Okay, where we left off. We were following one of Rosa Brooks war game scenarios

that she ran with a bunch of political insiders, high-powered people. She ran four different scenarios. We followed scenario one. In the game, we end up with a situation where the election comes down to Michigan. Michigan offers up two different sets of electors because of all of these kinds of shenanigans. They send two sets of electors, two Congress, one set for Biden, one set for Trump.

Congress meets. They cannot resolve the dispute. And we have what they call a constitutional crisis. There was no clear resolution of the conflict in the January 6th Joint Session of Congress. Neither campaign was willing to accept the result and called on their supporters to turn out in the streets to sway the result. President Trump also invoked the Insurrection Act. What's the Insurrection Act?

The Insurrection Act allows the act of duty U due to US military to be used domestically, you know, to put down an insurrection, maintain order, protect federal property. At this point in the scenario, when President Trump summons the military, he is still the commander-in-chief, after all. We arrive back at the question that got Rosa started with all of this when she was sitting at that bad chicken dinner. I mean, it's a really tricky issue. And I think if you have the Republican saying, Pence decides and Trump wins and the Democrat

saying, no, the evidence is that Biden won fair and square. What does the military do? Hello. Hello, you're there. Yes. That question led us to call a guy named Larry Wilkerson. How many I address you? I know your retire. You can call me Professor Colonel Larry. He's a retired Army colonel 31 years of soldier in the United States Army, roughly 2002 to 2005. I was chief of staff of the US Department of State. In these days, he teaches at the College of William and Mary. Yeah. Okay, so I'm wondering if I could take you through.

Anyway, we asked him about this moment where the president, Commander in Chief, tries to activate the military in the middle of a still uncertain election. How does what what happens then? First, let me say that I don't think the military is going to get substantially involved in the election or the aftermath of the election. But let me hastily add, we have put troops or federalized the national guard and put them in the streets many times in the past. I was in Detroit in, well loaded 50 caliber

machine gun on an APC with a national guard platoon sitting there trying to keep people from shooting American citizens in the streets of Detroit. We have done this before. We kill people in Oklahoma over as I recall over 200 people in the insurrection there. This is 1921, Tulsa Masker. We almost killed quite a few veterans in the bonus march when MacArthur took the military to Attacostia Flats and was all for machine gunning them. This is 1932.

So this is not a country that hasn't done this before. Let's get that straight. But we don't want to do it. But we very well could. One of the insights we gained from the simulations was there is a fairly logical path to real conflict. And in the scenario we've been following game one, the military did in fact deploy in major cities ready to step in on protests as needed.

And in fact, in many of the scenarios they played, things did end with the military stepping in. In one scenario, according to Rosa, the joint chiefs of staff, these are the most senior military officials in government. They sort of let it be known unofficially through leaks that they had decided that Biden was the legitimate winner and that they were going to, you know, he was the guy who was getting the nuclear codes and so on. And that was the thing that proved decisive. And so in that game, Biden was eventually inaugurated. But in our game, game one.

The partisans on both sides were still claiming victory, leading to the problem of two claims to commander-in-chief power, including access to the nuclear codes at noon on January 20th. And it was left totally unclear what the military would do. The possibility that at noon on the 20th, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have to hand the nuclear codes to somebody. Robert Raven again? Who holds the nuclear codes to somebody. Robert Raven again? Who holds the nuclear codes? They can come in and take them from Trump

and hand them to Biden. They can do nothing, which means Trump holds them. But it was sobering as a sort of a non-war mongering, peaceful American citizen to realize that it's the joint chiefs of staff of the military who will decide who the president is. What institutions are left to try and carry out a transition

of power? Howard O'Pinsky. You can see our democracy hanging in the balance here. And that was both amazing and also as a strategist. Oh, well then we got to work the military. Those are the refs and you got to work the refs. I think we collectively put a little too much faith in the law and in institutions as if they exist outside of politics and power, but they don't.

In the end, what you're left with is a simple realization, especially when you get into some of the wankery about a slights of electors and the vote shall be counted, that you realize that democracy is often just a series of habits. Yeah. is often just a series of habits. Yeah, a lot of these election things are like, it's a norm that the popular vote reflects who ends up in the electoral college, but it's not written down that it's required for legislatures.

It's also interesting that like, the thing that makes a norm a norm is the exercising of power. Like how else do you get a norm? Well, that's what you know what I mean? Yeah, like George Washington set the norm that you are in power for two terms as president. And from then on, nobody ran for a third term. It wasn't written down anywhere.

Yeah, and in fact, like people wanted them to stay on. They're like, George, don't go, but he said, no, I've got to dethrone. And then that decision, which in many ways is the bedrock of our democracy, it wasn't really written down anywhere and shined in law, at least not for a long time. It was just a choice that he made, that then the next guy made. And then the next guy made. So it was, it's, it's magnificent. How much, I mean, it's a little bit worrying now, but like, it's, it's kind of wild how much we are just dictated

by these things that normally happen. But might not. Thank you, Bethel. This story was reported by Bethel Hoppe, with help from Tracy Hunt. It was produced by Bethel. We had original music from Jeremy Bloom and I should also say that since we started this story, Bethel has unfortunately left us here at Radio Lab, which is a very sad thing for us, and the lucky people who get to work with her now are over at Gimlett, making a podcast called Resistance. Check it out, we definitely will be. And we wish Bethel

without we definitely will be, and we wish Bethel the very best of luck and we miss her already very much. Thank you to our scenario reader, Mark Mauritini and for casting Mark in a bunch of other actors for us, thanks to Dan Fink. Huge thanks to a ton of other people who were part of Rosa's game. We only used a small fraction of those people in the story,

but we are so thankful for all the people who gave us their time. Liz Mayor, Norm Eisen, Reed Galen, Yael Eisenstadt, Trey Grayson, Eli Parasare, Neil Minnie Rubin, Max Brooks, Ed Meyer, Edward Loose, Reverend Leah Dottry, David Harcini, and Carrie Cordero. I'm Chad Abumrod, Deep breaths, go vote, and thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Keith and Montreal, and it's just like my seventh attempt at all these names. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrod, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lafayette Nasr are our co-hosts.

Dylan Keith is our director of sound design, Suley Lechtenburg. Suley, no, Suley Lechtenburg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Breastler, Rico Kusik, David Gabel, Tracy Hunt, Matt Keetley, Tobin Lowe, Annie McEwen, Sarah Carey, Harry Ann Wag, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster,

with help from Schemoology. No? Seem... Ha! O'Lealy, Sarah Sandback, and Johnny Mones. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Thank you so much for your work folks. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Thank you so much for your work folks.