President Donald Trump did not have access to a slate of documents specifically showing him how to derail democracy when he tried to overthrow elections in 2020 with a fake electors scheme. But now he does, said Trump’s former intelligence analyst Miles Taylor.
“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,” said Taylor, who became a whistleblower in Trump’s first administration after allegations of the administration’s constitutional abuses.
Trump will likely push his bogus claim about the 2020 election being stolen from him in a Thursday address. But Taylor said more worrisome, the president may lay the groundwork 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,” said Taylor, who said he sought permission from the DHS in 2023 to speak on the documents. “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.”
Taylor said the formal name for the documents is “deliberately” boring: PEADs, or “presidential emergency action documents.” But the contents are anything but dull. Taylor said 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.
Career professionals around that book has worried Trump might abuse the emergency powers is contained, and Taylor said they worked hard to keep Trump toadies away from it to keep them from deftly manufacturing a crisis to justify using it.
“That nightmare nearly came true,” said Taylor, as officials “worked every person” they knew to keep Trump loyalist and OANN personality Christina Bobb off the National Security Council. Bobb went on to become a central player in Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election, said Taylor, proving the value of the book’s security.
“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,” said Taylor. “The only thing that saved us? Trump apparently didn’t know what he had.”
That was then, said Taylor. Today, Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office and surrounded by loyalists chosen precisely because they will use war powers to hijack our democracy.
“In other words, the guardrails are gone. The book is in his hands,” said Taylor.
But elections are run by states, Taylor reminded, and if Trump tries to usurp them he will be challenged in the courts, “where Trump has spent the past year getting his a—— kicked.”
Still, Taylor warned he wouldn’t bet the republic on the Trump administration’s “drooling incompetence.”
“No matter what happens, our ultimate backstop must be to make these elections Too Big To Rig,” said Taylor.