The Doomsday Book, a Plea for Rationality in an Irrational America
It’s quite likely that you don’t know what that is.
I confess my ignorance of the ‘Doomesday Book’ until reading an article by my favorite journalist, Seymour Hersh. It is he, you may remember (only if you are of a certain age) who made public, Nixon’s Watergate Break-in.
Oh dear, I am old indeed. That was half a century ago.
But Hersh is still with us, pen in hand, and I call your attention to his observations because I have been dumbfounded as to our current president’s ability to plow through all legal and constitutional restraints.
Seymour Hersh presages his article as follows;
“This is an account of the authorities, many of them top secret and higher, that permit President Donald Trump and his more knowledgeable senior aides to carry on their violent and vicious attacks on minorities and those who disagree with them and their policies with legislative and even legal impunity.
“The answer lies in most cases with what are known as Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEAD), which have enabled Trump today and his predecessors before him to suspend fundamental constitutional rights, detain civilians, seize property, impose martial law, and censor communications. These extraordinary powers have been put to widespread use by Trump and his aides, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought.
“They have acted with no congressional authority, no judicial review, and no statutory mechanism for Congress to terminate their powers, once activated, as they have been since Trump took office.”
The Doomsday Book illustrates the dangers in that dilemma, and it needs to be widely known.
PEAD, is much like the Nuclear Suitcase, in that such emergency actions were never expected to be used. But someone in the Trump administration peeked under the privacies carpet and found them.
They had been found before, but former presidents had reliably set them aside, understanding full well that such powers were never to be used for raw political purposes.
Until now.
But we have never before, until now, encountered a president like this one.
Enough, of what fiction writers would call ‘a teaser.’ Let’s peek inside.
Sorry, it’s classified, and neither you nor I (nor Seymour Hersh) have clearance.
If any (and all) of that sounds like something to keep out of the sticky fingers of President Trump, you are both right, and now aware of how he found the keys to dictatorship.
The short answer to its top-secret classification is that no one outside a very small circle in government knows the full contents of the current PEAD, not the Congress, the Supreme Court, or the Executive branch of government. They remain classified, and no complete set has ever been publicly released.
My sources tell me they are pre-written executive orders, proclamations, and messages to Congress that a president could sign immediately during a national emergency such as a nuclear war, catastrophic terrorist attack, cyber collapse, or other continuity-of-government crisis. They originated during the Eisenhower administration during the Cold War.
As did a lot of slop we no longer need, but still remain on the books.
And, what we do know comes from declassified references, FBI memoranda, presidential library records, and continuity-planning documents. Historically, PEAD has reportedly included provisions for declaring a national emergency, calling Congress into emergency session, imposing censorship of communications, as well as restricting travel and passport use.
As if that wasn’t enough, it also covers establishing martial-law-type authorities, suspending or limiting habeas corpus, detaining large groups of people deemed security risks, and expanding executive authority over transportation, communications, and industry.
Even during the height of the Cold War, we never came close enough to those conditions to act on their content.
Much of what was unclear, now makes itself more clear and, to my sensibilities, dangerous in the extreme.
Civil-liberties scholars have long worried that PEAD may authorize actions that would be constitutionally questionable in normal times. These are not normal times, by a long shot. But their abnormality is due to our current president, rather than threatening international forces.
What is particularly striking is that researchers have identified references to at least 56 PEADs in Justice Department budget documents, yet the actual texts remain classified. Even many executive-branch officials reportedly have not seen them.
The best-known historical examples that have surfaced include draft orders for national emergency declarations, suspension of habeas corpus the creation of a censorship office, martial-law arrangements, and mass detention programs. It should be noted that each of Trump’s 263 Executive Orders signed so far, depends upon a statement of national emergency that does not exist.
So, when people talk about the president’s ‘secret emergency powers,’ PEAD is usually what they mean.
The existence of the documents is no longer secret; their specific contents largely still are. One of the major constitutional questions is whether a president could actually enforce some of these actions without Congress or the courts intervening. Because the documents themselves remain hidden, that question has never been fully tested.
Might it be a sensible idea for those questions to come before the Supreme Court? I understand that Trump has the court in his pocket, but at least the request would have been made.
Enter Joel McCleary, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter and an expert on biological weapons.
Hersh writes,
“A friendship was inevitable when McCleary and I first met decades ago, but we grew closer after Trump took office for a second time in 2025 and began a massive attack on the federal government workforce and authorized Stephen Miller, who by any standard is a sadistic extremist, to carry out the mass deportation of Hispanics and others, both undocumented individuals and persons in the country legally, often separating parents and young children.
“McCleary began to tutor me then about the vast legal authorities Trump had under PEAD. These powers had accumulated in earlier presidencies as the Congress continued to disagree on legislation to deal with immigration policy. Trump, Miller and ICE, relying on secret PEADs, have increasingly divided America with their overly aggressive tactics.
“That this danger was not theoretical,” McCleary writes in the recent private memorandum, “was confirmed” in October 2024 when Time revealed that Mark Harvey, a former special assistant to Trump in his first term as President who personally oversaw the classified binder of PEADs known to some inside the White House as the “Doomsday Book,” publicly warned that the institutional safeguards he once worked within during Trump’s first term no longer existed.
“During Trump’s first term, Harvey explained, the senior national security staff “deliberately shielded the president from learning the full extent of the emergency authorities, fearing he would invoke them in situations far short of the catastrophic crises for which they were designed.”
And now the gloves are off those tiny hands and we are at risk.
Next week, Seymour Hersh promises, “I will report on past occasions when PEAD has been invoked, when presidents have seen fit to avoid congressional oversight, including the Iran-Contra affair.”
Stay tuned…