Donald Trump is not much of a reader. But there’s a book in the White House that – if he cracked it open — could change the course of his presidency and of America itself.
Three years ago, in the pages of Vanity Fair, I wrote about a manual that almost no one in America has ever seen. Inside the White House complex, in a secure location known to only a handful of people, sits an instruction book informally called the “Doomsday Book”. Its contents are formally known by an anodyne acronym — PEADs, or Presidential Emergency Action Documents.
They are draft executive orders, prepared in advance, that reportedly allow a president to do extraordinary things with the stroke of a pen during wartime-level emergencies, such as detaining civilians, suspending communications, censoring the press, freezing property and even imposing what amounts to martial law.
The PEADs were created in the Eisenhower era to keep the country running if Washington was destroyed in a nuclear strike. They were designed for the unimaginable – a decapitated government, an invading army or a moment when the survival of the American republic itself was in doubt. They were never meant to be a tool for ordinary politics. They were, in the words of one White House official I spoke with from the first Trump administration, who was familiar with such sensitive emergency protocols, “the Mad Libs for the most extreme measures of government” – a reference to the fill-in-the-blanks word game.
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After I served in Donald Trump’s administration, ultimately as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, one of the possibilities that worried me most was that the wrong person would gain access to that book. We came perilously close. In Trump’s final year, the White House apparently attempted to install a die-hard loyalist onto the National Security Council in a job that would have given her proximity to the nation’s most sensitive emergency authorities.
Career officials worked frantically to prevent it. “We were a hair’s width away,” one of them told me at the time. That individual would later surface as a foot soldier in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, which made national security officials all the more relieved that she’d never been given access to the government’s most sensitive “break glass” emergency powers.
The President himself – although I once heard him refer to his “magical authorities” to bypass legal constraints – did not fully understand the powers he possessed, I was told. Some of those who did understand were terrified he might use those authorities. One such official, who once held the keys to the Doomsday Book, warned me back then that if Trump returned to office, he feared those powers being turned not outward at America’s enemies but inward at citizens. He imagined federal forces ringing polling places in opposition states, intimidation dressed up as election security, and the architecture of homeland defence aimed at the homeland itself.
“It would be the inverse of election security,” he said. “It would militarise the elections process.”
That feels to me far from fantasy. He’s been drawn, again and again, to his emergency powers and the militarisation of policymaking. I watched Trump demand the military use lethal force at the border with Mexico where unarmed civilians were pouring across. I heard him insist we designate innocent people as “unlawful enemy combatants” to be imprisoned at the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In 2019, I remember him threatening that a “civil war” was afoot and a “coup” was in the works because of investigations into his administration – hyperbolic language that led, eventually, to the January 6 riot at the Capitol. And earlier this year, he openly declared that he “should have” ordered the National Guard to seize ballot boxes during that election.
It was 2022 when that official told me of his fears. I wrote about it further in a book called Blowback, which was meant to be a warning. I hoped it would age badly.
It has not.
This week, New York Times columnist Thomas B Edsall assembled, in one place, the words the President has said on the record about the limits of his power. They are worth reading, as they hint that he’s unafraid, if not eager, to flex his powers, including against the democratic process.
On elections: “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
On the limits of his power: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”
On the scope of his authority: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the President of the United States of America.”
The states that administer American elections are, he has decided, “agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over”.
To me, each and every one of those statements is anti-constitutional. Three years ago my concern was that Trump did not fully appreciate the powers he might – in a nightmare scenario – be able to abuse. Today, my concern is that he’s decided to do so.
Edsall’s column draws heavily on the work of Joel McCleary and Elizabeth Goitein, two of the most rigorous students of presidential emergency authority in the country. Goitein, who runs the liberty and national security programme at the Brennan Center for Justice, has spent years trying to drag the PEADs into the light.
McCleary, a co-founder of the bipartisan group Keep Our Republic, has been mapping what the Trump White House has been doing with classified emergency tools, particularly in relation to elections.
The picture they paint is of a layered system. At the bottom sits National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, signed last September. NSPM-7 cites no statute. It invents, by presidential fiat, a category of “domestic terrorist organisation” that does not exist in federal law, and directs the Department of Justice, the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies to investigate and prosecute groups whose politics the administration deems “anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-Christian”.
It is, as McCleary puts it, “running now, not waiting for a crisis”. On top of that sits the familiar machinery of national emergency declarations, which unlock more than 130 statutory authorities at the stroke of a pen. And at the apex sits the Doomsday Book itself – the PEADs, classified, never reviewed by Congress, never tested in court, and theoretically ready for a presidential signature at any moment.
Each layer normalises the next.
This week, the architecture took another step. On Tuesday, the White House released its new National Counterterrorism Strategy. For the first time in American history, an official counterterrorism document places domestic political movements on the same ledger as al Qaeda and Isis. It promises to “map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organisations”, language lifted directly from the post-9/11 playbook against foreign jihadi networks. It’s now pointed at Americans.
Look no further than the fact that administration officials now deride peaceful protesters as “domestic terrorists” or that ICE agents threaten to add American citizens to terrorist watchlists, simply for filming their activities.
The document announces a “pre-crime” enforcement model in which federal agents would investigate, disrupt and prosecute people not for what they have done but for what their politics suggest they might do. It expands the targeting categories to include, among other things, “radically pro-transgender ideologies”.
If you read the strategy alongside the President’s own words, you see that it’s much more than a counterterrorism document. It’s a permission slip.
Jonathan Winer, the former Clinton-era diplomat, has sketched out, in the The Washington Spectator, how the pieces would fit together if Trump chooses to use them around the 2026 midterms. The President declares the results rigged. Federal authorities open “investigations” into the count. Protests are reframed as organised political violence under NSPM-7.
Mass arrests follow, using the only paramilitary domestic detention infrastructure of sufficient scale: ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement – whose budget Congress has just inflated to $45bn, with $38.3bn of that for new facility construction. Communications systems are seized. Bank accounts are frozen.
“These actions could be taken broadly at the outset,” Winer writes, “before courts rule on their legality, preceding any form of judicial review.” By the time the courts catch up, the election is over.
I want to be careful about what I am saying. I am not predicting any of this will happen. I am saying that three years ago this scenario lived in the realm of cheap thrillers, and today it is the subject of academic papers, New York Times columns and formal policy memoranda issued on White House letterheads.
All the instruments required to execute it are now in place. The detention capacity is being built. The legal framework exists. The targeting doctrine exists. The classified emergency orders still allegedly exist. The man who would sign them has told us, on the record, that nothing but his own morality stands in the way.
The near-term remedy to this is not exotic. America’s elected leaders in Congress and election officials in all 50 states must be made aware of what could happen. These are scenarios almost none of them have imagined, let alone planned for. Yet I consider them to be more plausible than ever. And they must be proactive in preparing to challenge – in court – abuses of power that might be designed to keep the President’s party in power and to keep him, in his mind, away from the threat of impeachment.
This is why a civic organisation I run has decided to team up with other groups to begin briefing members of Congress and state leaders on the scope of this architecture – namely, what emergency powers are known to exist based on declassified materials, what powers could be unlawfully abused and what guardrails can be put in place before the midterms. We’re doing it on a bipartisan basis because, in the long term, the question is not which party holds these powers today. The question is whether any human should hold them at all.
When I wrote Blowback, the people I quoted – including career officials, former cabinet secretaries, the man who once carried the Doomsday Book – sounded even to me at times like they were borrowing from a paperback. I worried readers would find their words lurid. I don’t worry about that any more.
This is no longer the stuff of cheap fiction. But if we let it happen, American democracy would read like one.
Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a No 1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator and democracy reform leader.
