There's a big red button on Donald Trump's desk that he can press to order a Diet Coke. Thankfully, there is no actual button that summons nuclear war, or we would all be glowing ash by now. Truthfully, if there were such a button, George W. Bush would have dusted us a dozen times over. Trump may be America's worst White House resident, but this is far from the first time we've elected an idiot.
However, there is one metaphorical button Trump loves to smash. That's the one that declares a national emergency. The colossal national failure to limit a president's ability to declare emergencies and keep declaring them is how we came to live in an era with over 50 simultaneous national emergencies. So if you're feeling tense, congratulations. Apparently, you should be.
And there's another button. One that's hidden below, or inside of, the one that declares emergencies. What that button does is ... no one knows.
Unfortunately, the National Emergencies Act, written in the middle of the Cold War at a time when just about the only emergency anyone could fathom involved Soviet missiles screaming over the North Pole, gives permission for whoever is behind the Resolute Desk to declare all the emergencies they want. The congressional authors of that act never seemed to think anyone would declare a national emergency because they didn't like the way Brazilian elections turned out, or had a hatred for windmills, or decided that the International Criminal Court is a criminal.
Only 10 of the 50+ current emergencies are new ones issued by Trump in the last year. The rest have just been allowed to linger from his first term, or from previous administrations, with one going back to Jimmy Carter. However, there's a huge difference between the Trump-generated emergencies and those left over from previous White Houses.
The majority of those outstanding emergencies can be considered under the category Mostly Harmless. That Carter-era emergency is a sanction freezing some assets of Iranian leaders going back to the hostage crisis. Similar monetary lockdowns come from Clinton (on assets of suspected narcotraffickers), Obama (Somali pirates, international criminal gangs, known cyber criminals), and Biden (Russian oil companies, Ethiopian rebels, more drug traffickers). It's worth mentioning that Biden had another emergency declaration sanctioning those who threatened the security of the West Bank. Trump ended that one on his first day back in the White House.
Why are presidents so reluctant to end an existing emergency, and why is Trump so anxious to add more? The reason is that every time he taps the button, Trump can declare that he is availing himself of one, ten, or any number of the 137 special powers granted to presidents under this act. And they're cumulative. So Trump holds special powers over shipping because Clinton declared an emergency after Cuba shot down a civilian plane in 1996. And he holds additional trade authority because Bush claimed it after a bill on export duties expired.
Trump's national emergencies are ... different. They include a checklist of conspiracy theories and executive power grabs, such as: Ordering the Secretary of Defense to redirect military units to the southern border; scrapping decades of environmental rules while hamstringing renewable power to boost oil and gas; stealing Venezuela's national resources and routing the profits to an offshore account; and tariffs, tariffs, tariffs,
And then there's this one, declared during Trump's first round in Washington. For the last week, no one in or out of the administration seemed capable of providing a straight answer to "why was Tulsi Gabbard in Fulton County, Georgia?" but the answer has been written down for eight years.
... the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the heads of any other appropriate executive departments and agencies (agencies), shall conduct an assessment of any information indicating that a foreign government, or any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of a foreign government, has acted with the intent or purpose of interfering in that election. ... The Director of National Intelligence shall deliver this assessment and appropriate supporting information to the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security.
The stated time period for any evaluation of the 2020 elections is long past, but this is obviously why Trump personally directed Gabbard to make an appearance in Atlanta while FBI agents were running off with ballots and voting records. Gabbard is going to deliver a wild theory (her specialty) that a foreign government somehow flipped something very close to 12,000 votes in Georgia. She'll lay out her evidence to Trump, Scott "George Soros is behind everything" Bessent, Pete "the Left was behind January 6" Hegseth, Pam "Biden crime family" Bondi, and Kristi "Great Replacement Theory" Noem.
These half-dozen people, who have easily endorsed ten times as many baseless conspiracies, will then determine if Gabbard's latest wild-assery is enough to warrant a declaration of foreign interference. Want to guess what they are going to say?
What happens next isn't well defined. Trump's executive order calls for sanctions against any country involved, including against select businesses and individuals located in that country. It also calls for the freezing of any assets or deals in the United States associated with those countries/companies/people, restrictions on exports, ending loans, booting out officials, and threatening other nations that deal with the accused culprit. It also calls for prohibitions and sanctions against "United States persons" for involvement with the accused.
It's not difficult to think of Gabbard, who has called Russia's invasion of Ukraine justified, gone on Fox to spread claims of U.S. biolabs in Ukraine, and backed disproven conspiracies about Joe Biden's connections to Ukraine, might "discover" that, gee-golly-what-do-you-know, Ukraine handed the election to Biden. Such a tale would immediately be devastating to Ukraine, but it might be just as devastating to the United States.
If Trump followed up such a faux finding with a fresh declaration of national emergency, we could see FBI agents raiding Democratic campaign offices in the days and weeks before elections, questioning or detaining volunteers, and running off with documents on both voters and funding. Or Trump might freeze the assets of Act Blueāalready the focus of a Trump attackāon the grounds that they acted as a "straw donor" for foreign sources. Steve Bannon's call for ICE agents to surround polling places may be illegal, but there's a reason Trump keeps a painting of Andrew Jackson on his wall. The same reason that ICE keeps ignoring judicial orders.
Trump has a private army. Federal judges don't.
One of the so far unclaimed powers in the National Emergency Act specifically connects to the Communications Act, allowing Trump to seize control of the media (including the internet) and even turn off phones or other "devices capable of emitting electromagnetic radiations within the jurisdiction of the United States." That's a power so vast that it's hard to even guess at the effects.
Bad as all this would be, it's only the first stage of possible assaults on the midterm elections. In addition to declaring a vanilla national emergency, as he has already done 22 times, Trump has something else. He has that other button.
He could issue a Presidential Emergency Action Document (PEAD).
What's a PEAD and what can it do? We don't know. Like the National Emergencies Act, they were built with a Cold War mindset to allow the president to take fast action in a genuine emergency. They contain sets of pre-packaged declarations designed to address specific catastrophes.
But this time, there is no neatly enumerated list of what they can do. As the Brennan Center explains:
Faced with the possibility of a Soviet nuclear strike, mid- to late-20th-century presidents crafted a collection of pre-planned emergency actions. Although none has ever been leaked, declassified, or deployed, we know that some early drafts rested on broad claims to inherent executive power. Official reports from the 1960s indicate that various PEADs authorized the president to suspend habeas corpus, detain ādangerous personsā within the United States, censor news media, and prevent international travel. (The Brennan Centerās repository of related materials, spanning the administrations of 12 presidents, can be found here.)
The complete set of PEADs already waiting to be pulled out and played like a trump card (pun intended) is collectively known as the "Doomsday Book," which seems entirely appropriate.
Individual documents have been touched up from time to time as the focus of national concerns changed and technology advanced, but there's little evidence that any of these documents had been made weaker. The last time the Doomsday Book faced any kind of systematic review was under George W. Bush. It's a good bet that if anything changed, it was only to add torture and arbitrary invasion to the list of Things I Can Do.
All of this applies to what Trump might do leading up to the election or on Election Day. But the greater threat may be following the election, when Trump could grasp the same fistful of emergency powers to discredit the results and declare himself the sole national authority. This may seem so far off the deep end that it represents the worst-case scenario. It does not.
If all of this long ago entered the TL;DR category, here's a quick list of what we might expect from Trump based on his past actions and nearly unchecked powers under the NEA:
- Trump will declare a "national election security emergency."
- He will do everything he can to disrupt the 2026 midterms, including using claims of past foreign interference as an excuse to impede Democratic campaigns and funding organizations.
- He will use repeated claims about voting by non-citizens and Democratic opposition to the SAVE Act as an excuse to threaten (or actually conduct) ICE operations near polling stations, particularly in blue cities found in red states.
- No matter how decisive the Republican loss, Trump will do everything he can to discredit the outcome of the election and to suggest the incoming Congress is invalid.
All of the above are good bets. Trump will likely use additional declarations of national emergency to take unprecedented actions, while any opposition slogs its way through a court stacked in Trump's favor.
Itās unlikely that Trump will do anything as blatant as taking control of the media, or having his pet DOJ charge Democratic candidates with crimes. But he could. After all, everything about the last year seems unlikely.
Comments
We want Uncharted Blue to be a welcoming and progressive space.
Before commenting, make sure you've read our Community Guidelines.