A former Department of Homeland Security official warned Wednesday that President Donald Trump has imminent plans to invoke emergency powers he’s never actually had authority to use, and that unlike his first term, there are no guardrails to stop him.
Miles Taylor, ex-DHS chief of staff, argued on his Substack that Trump will address election fraud claims on Thursday as a prelude to accessing what government insiders call the “Doomsday Book“—a collection of “presidential emergency action documents,” or PEADs, that theoretically provide “break-glass options for national emergencies.”
The problem for Taylor are the contents of the book, which he wrote “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.”
Taylor said he feared Trump could manipulate those powers to produce “nightmare” results.
“What if Trump discovered these emergency powers could be weaponized for purposes beyond actual emergencies?” he wrote. “What if someone manufactured a crisis to justify it?”
Recalling that scenario nearly became reality in Trump’s first term, Taylor claimed this time could be quite different.
“The guardrails are gone,” he wrote, “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.”
If one guardrail remains, Taylor argued it was the Trump administration’s competency, or lack thereof.
“I won’t bet the republic on their drooling incompetence,” he wrote. “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.”
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