Trump thinks he has ‘doomsday’ powers to steal votes. He's wrong. But take him seriously.
The president has long fantasized about using secret, “break glass” presidential authorities. The midterms might be his chance to abuse them.
Years ago, I warned that if Donald Trump returned to office, he’d dust off something no American has ever heard of — the presidential “Doomsday Book” — to wield dictator-like powers. Now, he has the book in his hands.
Tomorrow night, Trump will address the nation in primetime about “elections.” The White House has been cagey about the contents of his remarks. I won’t be. Having spent years inside the national security apparatus, including as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during Trump’s first term, I can tell you what this is really about. I expect him to re-air his election grievances and, worse, hint at how he’ll rig the system in his favor so he never loses again.
I wrote yesterday that the president will almost certainly revisit bogus claims about the 2020 election being “stolen” from him. But more worrisome, the president may lay the predicate to invoke extraordinary emergency powers to interfere with the midterm elections, beyond what he’s already done. And most Americans have no idea these powers exist. I warned about them several years ago (and sought permission from the DHS in 2023 to tell you what I’m about to tell you below).
Somewhere inside the White House complex, hidden in a secure location, sits an instruction manual that almost no one is allowed to see. Officials who know about it call it the “Doomsday Book.” It contains the president’s break-glass options for national emergencies. These are the actions a commander-in-chief might take if, say, Washington, D.C. becomes a smoking crater from a foreign attack, if enemy forces are hunting down American leaders, or if the survival of the republic itself hangs in the balance. Not something you deal with every day.
The formal name is deliberately boring: PEADs, or “presidential emergency action documents.” The contents are evidently anything but. Declassified records hint at draft orders that would let a president detain “dangerous persons” without trial, censor the press, flip an internet kill switch, commandeer social media, or even ground Americans and stop them from traveling.
One former National Security Council official, Mark Harvey, was once the keeper of the book. He described it to me as “the Mad Libs for the most extreme measures of government.” These were pre-drafted orders a president could execute, in his words, with the stroke of a pen. Harvey’s job was to advise whether it was ever time to pull that book off the shelf. So he lived on hair-trigger alert.
During Trump’s first term, the career professionals around that book had a shared, unspoken fear: What if the wrong person got access to it? What if someone whispered to Trump that these emergency powers could be used for something other than an emergency? What if someone manufactured a crisis to justify it?
That nightmare nearly came true.
In Trump’s final year in office, the White House pushed to install a loyalist into one of the handful of jobs with access to the Doomsday Book. Her name was Christina Bobb, the diehard Trump partisan who would later become an OANN personality and one of the ex-president’s personal lawyers at Mar-a-Lago. Career officials were alarmed. One person closely involved told me they “worked every person” they knew to keep Bobb off the National Security Council. We were, in that person’s view, a hair’s width away.
Bobb, of course, went on to become a central player in Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election. Former NSC staffers believe the coup plot could’ve been dramatically more dangerous if someone like her had known the full extent of the president’s dormant emergency powers, which might have conceivably been twisted to justify seizing all of the ballots that had been cast, stopping Mike Pence from certifying the election, and who knows what else.
The only thing that saved us? Trump apparently didn’t know what he had. A former White House lawyer shared that the president was never briefed on the full scope of his emergency authorities, because there hadn’t really been the need. There was no imminent threat of invasion or nuclear annihilation, for instance. But if Trump had spent more time noodling on his arcane authorities (and cooking up ways to use them during elections), the result could have been catastrophic.
That was then. Today, Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office, surrounded not by the lifelong national-security professionals who wouldn’t dream of using war powers to hijack our own democracy, but by loyalists chosen precisely because they will.
In other words, the guardrails are gone. The book is in his hands.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Earlier this year, DEFIANCE.org granted funds to an organization run by former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt and former Senator Tim Wirth — two men with seven decades of public service between them, neither of whom has ever been accused of hysteria — to support their efforts to sound the alarm about the misuse of these powers to influence the midterm elections. They’ve have been performing an amazing public service by doing so.
A few weeks ago, they issued their starkest warning yet, writing that we are witnessing a “rolling coup.” That doesn’t look like tanks in the streets on a single dramatic day, but under Trump, it’s become the methodical assembly of state power (e.g. emergency declarations, troops on domestic soil, seized voter rolls, expanded detention capacity, and more) designed to ensure that this president wields unprecedented control over our country. With the PEADs / Doomsday Book now within Trump’s reach, they warn, he is looking to remix and deploy that array of authorities to seize control over how Americans vote.
In my opinion, the White House hopes to overwhelm state and local governments ahead of November with these extraordinary claims of presidential power by moving so fast, on so many fronts, with so much legal-sounding jargon, that election officials freeze and voters despair, thereby making it easier for them to influence the outcome or contest the results.
So let me say this as plainly as I can, as someone who knows a thing or two about the subject of election security: not only would Trump be misreading his emergency powers if he used them to influence our elections, doing so would be flatly unconstitutional. Elections are run by the states. There is no PEAD, emergency declaration, or national security memorandum that can change that. Period. If he moves forward with such a plan anyway, his actions can and will be challenged in the courts, where Trump has spent the past year getting his ass kicked. One way or another, he will lose in the end.
But he won’t lose before flooding the zone with misinformation and confusion about what his powers actually are. Which means that, by the time a court renders a final judgment, it could be too late. That’s why we need to shine a light on this dark corner of presidential mischief. And we have to do it before Thursday night.
I can’t tell you what the president will announce specifically. However, election-protection experts expect a dizzying array of claims. The president may say he has the power to seize voting machines… to stop mail-in ballots, despite court orders to the contrary… to censor “false” election information… to vacuum up state voter lists, even though judges have halted his attempts… to take over electoral functions in the name of preventing foreign interference… and so on. Experts will scramble to rebut each of these claims, statute by statute, and the American people might get lost in the weeds.
Don’t.
Zoom out. Every one of these claims is a tree. The forest is what Gephardt and Wirth named it. A rolling coup. And history is unambiguous about how coups are stopped. The lawyers perform a vital role, yes. They will be our forward guard in the courts, fighting for the Constitution. But coups are really stopped by a populace stirred to anger and action at the sight of their democracy being taken from them.
Our solace, such as it is? Trump is a loser surrounded by losers. His administration has been beaten again and again in federal court. This isn’t because judges are out to get him; rather, it’s because his people are incompetent and can’t seem to read the law. The same pathetic crowd of has-beens that couldn’t pull off a ham-fisted, first-term quest to steal an election won’t be able to execute a power grab in the second, no matter how much time they’ve had to prepare.
Even still, I won’t bet the republic on their drooling incompetence. No matter what happens, our ultimate backstop must be to make these elections Too Big To Rig. I’ll say it again and again in the months to come. That means no matter what barriers they throw in our way, Americans WILL be registered to vote. They WILL show up at the polls. And they WILL defeat the pro-dictator MAGA candidates in numbers too overwhelming for any emergency decree to erase.
On this point, we won’t just talk the talk. Our movement at DEFIANCE is about real action. Today is Wednesday, which means tonight — 5 p.m. ET, at our Weekly Mission Briefing — we’ll announce yet another tangible effort to counter Trump’s corruption. And if you’ve read this far, I’ve given you a preview of what it will be. So I hope you’ll tune in tonight (or watch the replay) to find out how we’re going to make sure that, no matter what Trump does, the American people will be able to exercise their democratic rights.
Donald Trump may have some warped version of the “Doomsday Book” on his desk and an island of misfit advisors. We have each other and the United States Constitution on our side. I like our odds.
Your friend, in defiance,
IF YOU’RE A MEMBER, YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE NEWSLETTER BELOW THE LINE. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE!
