How Trump could use a secret Cold War 'doomsday' manual: ex-White House insider

Back in the 1950s during the Cold War, officials in the Eisenhower Administration wrote what are known as PEADs (Presidential Emergency Action Documents) and gathered them in the "Doomsday Book" — an instructional book detailing executive orders a president could give during a really extreme scenario such as a nuclear attack on Washington, DC. At the time, the fear of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was quite real. And after President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office, that fear escalated with the John F. Kennedy-era Bay of Pigs crisis in 1961.

The "Doomsday Book" and its PEADs still exist. And in a sobering article published by the UK-based i Paper on May 8, former U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Miles Taylor lays out some ways in which they could be dangerously abused by President Donald Trump and his loyalists.

The conservative Taylor, who served in DHS during Trump's first presidency but is now very much in the Never Trump camp, describes PEADs as "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," Taylor explain. "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…. 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."

Taylor continues, "In Trump's final year, the White House apparently attempted to install a diehard 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…. 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."

As critical as Taylor was of Trump's first presidency, he is much more worried about his second. And he describes some disturbing power-grab scenarios in which Trump could abuse PEADs and the Doomsday Book.

"Jonathan Winer, the former Clinton-era diplomat, has sketched out, in The Washington Spectator, how the pieces would fit together if Trump chooses to use them around the 2026 midterms," Taylor warns. "The president declares the results rigged. Federal authorities open 'investigations' into the count. Protests are reframed as organized 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."

The former DHS official continues, "Communications systems are seized. Bank accounts are frozen…. 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."

• george conway
• noam chomsky
• civil war
• Kayleigh mcenany
• Melania trump
• drudge report
• paul krugman
• Lindsey graham
• Lincoln project
• al franken bill maher
• People of praise
• Ivanka trump
• eric trump