Former President Donald Trump could be far more terrifying than many people realize in his second term, wrote former Trump administration Homeland Security official Miles Taylor for Vanity Fair from an adaptation of his new book, "Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump."
That's because the national security apparatus has what's informally known as a "doomsday book" of emergency directives for extreme actions that suspend normal law and rights — and although these orders are generally kept secret from the president, Trump could conjure up a way to have it delivered to him.
"The options are known by an anodyne name — PEADs — or 'presidential emergency action documents,'" wrote Taylor, who is best known as the writer of the anonymous New York Times op-ed proclaiming there was a 'resistance' against Trump in the civil service. "Recently declassified records suggest that the PEADs allow the president to invoke extraordinary powers. The records hint at draft authorizations to enable the White House to unilaterally detain 'dangerous persons,' censor the news media, flip an internet 'kill switch,' take over social media, and suspend Americans from traveling."
Obviously these are powers only meant for existential threats to America, wrote Taylor: "These might be the type of actions a president would take if the nation’s capital was destroyed, enemy forces were hunting down U.S. leaders, or the survival of U.S. democracy was in doubt." Additionally, wrote Taylor, Trump was kept "in the dark" about the PEAD powers, because no one with access to them wanted to brief him about them and were terrified the consequences of him knowing about and using them would be "catastrophic."
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However, in the final days of office, Trump moved to put a hardcore MAGA loyalist in one of the few offices that had access to the "Doomsday Book," raising alarms among security officials.
"In Trump’s final year in office, the White House sought to put a loyalist into one of the jobs with access to the Doomsday Book. According to sources, that person was Christina Bobb. The Trump staffer — who later became a reporter for the MAGA-friendly One America News Network (OANN) and served as a personal attorney to the ex-president at Mar-a-Lago — was seen by the White House as a diehard Trump supporter. They wanted her on the NSC," wrote Taylor. "'I worked every person I knew to make sure that Christina Bobb didn’t get assigned to the National Security Council,' explained an individual closely involved with the situation, noting that the woman was dangerously unqualified. Career officials believed that Bobb was the type of ideologue who might misuse the sensitive NSC perch. 'We were a hair’s width away from her taking the role,' the former official remarked."
Bobb, who also previously served as an attorney for the Trump campaign, has espoused extremist beliefs, including claiming that Joe Biden is a "fake president" who is part of a shadowy force trying to "enslave everybody."
The scary part, warned Taylor, is that if Trump becomes president again, these sorts of guardrails won't exist — he will see to it with "mass recriminations" and the adoption of new rules that suspend merit protections for the civil service, purging everyone except hardcore loyalists who won't hesitate to hand him the "doomsday book."