Doomsday and Democracy: Former Trump Aides Warn of Secret Presidential Crisis Powers

Locked away in a classified safe on the White House grounds is a stack of papers crafted over decades with the hope that no one would ever use them. It lists the extraordinary powers a President may be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack or other massive catastrophe. Among the select few who have been granted access to the nation’s most closely held secrets, the pages are known as the Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs. Some simply call it the “Doomsday Book.”

Over the decades, the book has come to include ready-made orders to suspend habeas corpus, the ancient and bedrock principle that those arrested appear before a judge, put parts of the country under military control, impose martial law, block Americans from traveling overseas, and restrict telecommunications, according to conversations with national security officials and analysis of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act filings by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and policy institute. The public doesn’t know the extent of those presumed powers or the situations under which a President might claim the authority to deploy them. Successive administrations have refused to let Congress see the documents, arguing that they are confidential legal advice for the President. When Donald Trump was in the Oval Office, members of his national security staff actively worked to keep him from learning the full extent of these interpretations of presidential authority, concerned that he would abuse them.

Now some former Trump advisors are raising the alarm about the dangers of Trump having access to the Doomsday Book in a second term. The former officials—which include Mark Harvey, who oversaw the Doomsday Book while on Trump’s National Security Council, and Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security—worry that Trump would use the powers in situations that fall far short of the crises they were drafted to address. Trump has a history of testing the limits of presidential powers, and in a second term would be free of many of the guardrails that restricted his first one. The Supreme Court ruled in July that Presidents have partial immunity for official actions. Trump’s senior advisors have a plan to purge the federal service of people unwilling to carry out his orders. “He’s going to be surrounded by a set of people that would say, ‘You have the power to do this,’” says Harvey. “Frankly, if he says, ‘Yes,’ and there are people that go do it, what’s to stop him?”

But to use these powers, a President is expected to have a genuine emergency that justifies their use, say two former White House lawyers familiar with the draft documents. The draft orders in the Doomsday Book are written for truly extraordinary situations that have debilitated the federal government or Congress and require the President to ensure the continuity of government, according to the former White House lawyers. If a President overstated the crisis, the order could be struck down in court. The last time the book was revised was during the Obama administration, and the Biden administration is currently reviewing it, says a person familiar with the documents. The Trump campaign declined to comment for this story which is based on interviews with more than a dozen national security officials from the current and previous administrations, including five from Trump’s first term.

It’s hard to have a public debate about presidential authorities that aren’t fully known. Which is why some of the public’s representatives are working to learn more, as well as to fence in what any President can do in extreme emergencies, be it Trump, his 2024 opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, or some future power-hungry Commander-in-Chief. A bipartisan group of senators—Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah and Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy of Connecticut—are pressing for more details about what’s in the draft orders, when they can be used, and what legal theories justify them. Paul has requested the White House let him read the PEADs in a classified setting but was denied, he says. “That is alarming to us and we’d like to know more about them,” Paul tells TIME. “The idea that we would have emergency orders written up to replace the constitutional republic in times of emergencies, that would alarm anybody.”

The draft presidential orders are kept locked in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility at the White House and electronically on a highly restricted server, according to two former federal officials familiar with how such documents are stored. Some of the draft orders have blank spaces for filling in details like the date and circumstances for a power to be used, those people said. White House officials sometimes refer to them during classified tabletop exercises acting out how the government would respond in an overwhelming disaster. Their authorities derive from long-standing laws like the Insurrection Act of 1807, the Communications Act of 1934, the National Emergencies Act of 1976, and the Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as secret Justice Department legal interpretations of inherent presidential constitutional powers, says Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on national security law at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Since World War II, Presidents of both parties have increasingly laid claim to a vast reservoir of latent constitutional emergency powers, says Goitein. “Everything about these documents is just completely shrouded in secrecy, so there’s no oversight,” Goitein says. “My concern is the President will act in ways that are inconsistent and irreconcilable not only with individual liberties as guaranteed by the Constitution, but by democracy itself.”

For all the campaign year rhetoric, sober or otherwise, about Trump becoming a dictator, the Doomsday Book contains an actual menu of real-world options for how a Commander in Chief could dramatically extend the powers of the presidency, based on decades of legal interpretation by lawyers in multiple administrations. The pages are the physical distillation of the extraordinary trust placed in Presidents by the American people, who assume that such authority will be used responsibly and temporarily to shepherd the country through an existential crisis—and not to perpetuate personal power or revenge.

During his first term, Trump repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to push the limits of presidential powers, often for his own political advantage. He diverted military funding to build parts of the border wall. He tried to hold hostage hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. He also repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to pursue those he viewed as enemies.

When Trump has signaled support for military tribunals for political enemies like Liz Cheney, for example, he “undermines” the confidence Americans have in the rule of law, says H.R. McMaster, who served as National Security Advisor during Trump’s first year in office. The decision by Oliver Cromwell to use the military to form a new British government in 1653 was on the minds of the American founders when they designed the separation of powers, McMaster says. “Our founders set up a really bold line, you know, between the military and politics and for good reason.” 

Trump has told voters in his own words that he’s not finished pushing the limits of the presidency. Trump has said he’d only be a dictator on “day one” in order to close the border and expand oil drilling. He’s called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” to crack down on crime in the U.S. He told TIME in April that he’d deploy the National Guard to round up millions of immigrants not authorized to be in the country “and, if necessary, I'd have to go a step further.” Some of the aides around Trump now are aware of the powers contained in the Doomsday Book, says a former senior homeland security official who served in the Trump administration.

During the final year of Trump’s first term, Mark Harvey was making plans to move on from his job in Trump’s National Security Council. Harvey was a career civil servant and, as senior director for resilience policy, ran an office in charge of making sure the federal government was prepared to respond to catastrophic disasters. Whoever replaced him in the role would oversee the Doomsday Book, as well as play a role in election security heading into the 2020 election.

Trump’s inner circle had complained for years that they didn’t have enough loyalists in key positions to push through Trump’s orders. In an effort to fix that, Trump had put in charge of the White House personnel office his former body man John McEntee. McEntee had been brought back to the White House after being told to resign earlier in the term at the direction of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly because of an issue with his security clearance background check, according to his sworn testimony before the Jan. 6 Committee. Harvey panicked when he heard that McEntee’s office was considering a Homeland Security official named Christina Bobb to replace him.

Bobb was a lawyer and a former Marine who was working in the office of the executive secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. Harvey says he thought Bobb lacked the experience in national emergencies for the role and was alarmed that Bobb’s name would be floated. He took his concerns to the National Security Council chief of staff, Alexander Gray, and deputy national security advisor Matt Pottinger, he says. Bobb met with Pottinger but didn’t get the job, according to a person familiar with their meeting. For Harvey and two other former Trump administration officials involved, it felt like a very close call.

Bobb would later volunteer to be a lawyer for Trump in election fraud cases after the 2020 election, working closely with Rudy Giuliani to collect information about the elections in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, and was with Giuliani at the Willard Hotel on the day of Jan. 6, 2021, Bobb told the Jan. 6 committee. In May of this year, she was among 11 Republicans charged in Arizona with criminal charges including conspiracy, fraud and forgery for her alleged efforts to subvert Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Bobb declined a request to comment.

Richard Nixon has long served as a cautionary example of the abuse of presidential power. Nixon sent the IRS and FBI to investigate his political enemies, and he obstructed the investigation of the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate. But there were also moments, like when Nixon had had too much to drink, that his staff chose to shield him from consequential decisions, afraid of what he might order them to do. One evening in October 1973, as Nixon was facing elevated tensions with Soviet Russia over the Arab-Israeli war and the Watergate scandal was heating up, British Prime Minister Edward Heath tried to arrange a call between him and Nixon around 8 p.m. When Deputy National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft brought the request to Henry Kissinger, Kissinger said to tell the Brits that Nixon wouldn’t be available until the morning. "When I talked to the President he was loaded,” Kissinger told Scowcroft, according to transcripts of their conversation released by the National Archives.

For Philip Bobbitt, a constitutional law professor and former NSC senior director during the Clinton Administration, the way Nixon’s staff handled him highlights how many White House staff are in the loop before any presidential decision can be enacted. Trump would face the same dynamic in a second term, Bobbitt argues, even if he were to successfully purge some career civil servants he considered insufficiently loyal. “There’s no red button” to press, says Bobbitt. The protocols in place to initiate hostilities are extensive and require sign off from a lot of people. “I don’t think as you go down the chain of command, people are going to commit crimes based on Trump’s reading of the Supreme Court opinion or his convictions about his own constitutional power,” Bobbitt says.

A former senior White House official who worked closely with Trump agrees with Bobbitt’s view up to a point. The former Trump official thinks it would be hard for the National Security Council to be used for political warfare and the abuse of power. “It’s more the entrepreneurial sycophant who makes it in from some corner of the White House or from the Department of Justice or some other part of the bureaucracy and says, ‘I’ve got an idea for you Mr. President.’” That would require going around the senior leaders to get a memo to the President’s desk. Trump is “willing to short circuit the process in the service of expediency,” the former official says.

There are members of Congress who don’t want interpretations of our Constitutional rights to be entirely dependent on the judgment of White House aides. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah teamed up with Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy of Connecticut to introduce a bill in June requiring congressional approval within 30 days of many uses of the President’s emergency powers. In September, the Republican-controlled House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved a version of the bill. Republican Senator Rand Paul has proposed legislation to require the disclosure to Congress of all of the Presidential Emergency Action Documents and specifically strip the President of one of those powers: the ability to seize control of the Internet and other U.S. communications based on an interpretation of the Communications Act of 1934. “All presidents want more power,” Paul says. “They often do it thinking that our own good is their goal. Good intentions are not enough, and checks and balances are important.”

When the Senate returns to Washington after the election in November, Paul says he’ll be pushing to get the provisions of his legislation inserted into the spending bill that has to pass by the end of December. If Trump wins the election, he may find more Democrats lining up behind it.