The Secret 'Doomsday Book' That Enables Trump's Abuses of Power

Presidential Emergency Action Documents have a long history, but Trump’s invocation of them on immigration betrays their original purpose

By Seymour Hersh, Substack

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 (PEADs), 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.

These little known and rarely discussed authorities have been developed across more than a dozen administrations, since Dwight Eisenhower was in office, by presidents of both political parties, and their secrecy and authority have yet to be successfully challenged in Congress or by a federal court. One of the most detailed accounts of PEADs, last updated in 2024, has been prepared by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy group sponsored by NYU School of Law. It warns of the political danger of PEADs as extraordinary secret presidential documents that have never been declassified or leaked: “It appears they are not even subject to congressional oversight. Although the law requires the executive branch to report even the most sensitive covert military and intelligence operations to at least some members of Congress, there is no such disclosure requirement for PEADs, and no evidence that the documents have ever been shared with relevant congressional committees.”

I am summarizing here the initial paragraphs from what is perhaps the most detailed and up-to-date private study of PEADs written by Joel McCleary, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter and an expert on biological weapons. McCleary has steeped himself for decades in the study of secret presidential authorities. He is a low-profile Harvard graduate who served as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee during the Carter administration and later led projects for the Defense Department and Homeland Security regarding pandemic and biological defense issues. I wrote a book on chemical and biological warfare and worked with members of Congress in the months before President Richard Nixon agreed in 1969 to enact a US ban on such weapons. 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.