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The Shadowy Powers that Trump Could Use to End American Democracy

Two Washington insiders are sounding the alarm about what could happen if Trump declares a national emergency and activates the top-secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents.

President Donald Trump speaks at the Nassau County Police Academy’s David S. Mack Center for Training and Intelligence in Garden City, New York, on August 14, 2026.

In early 2024, as the presidential election season heated up and Donald Trump’s antidemocratic language intensified, two alumni of the Washington power structure began publishing a series of memos titled “Dancing in the Dark” in The Washington Spectator.

The authors were Mark Medish, an attorney who served as a special assistant to the president, a senior director at the National Security Council, and a deputy assistant to the secretary of the US Treasury under President Bill Clinton; and Joel McCleary, who was a deputy assistant to the president during the Carter administration.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Medish and McCleary published three long essays detailing ways in which Trump and the MAGA movement were corroding democratic norms. Then they went quiet. Two weeks ago, the duo re-emerged with an alarming new essay, “It’s the Power, Stupid: Dancing in the Dark, Part 4.”

The warnings in Medish and McCleary’s latest essay are stark. They center around the possibility that a cornered, wrathful Trump—enabled by supine leadership in the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and other key departments of government, as well as by GOP leadership in Congress—could declare a national emergency in the run-up to and aftermath of the midterm elections. Their fear is that, if he does so, he might then activate the highly secretive, Cold War era Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), authored to ensure continuity of the government following a nuclear attack, in an attempt to suspend the constitutional order.

PEADs exist outside of the regular legislative and legal framework of the country. Drafted by a series of White House lawyers from the Eisenhower presidency onward, they are, by definition, extra-constitutional. Congress isn’t looped in on their specifics; few attorneys within government, outside of a handful at the epicenter of White House power, are thought to have seen them; only a select few cabinet members, including the vice president, the defense secretary, the national security director, and the head of the CIA, are thought to have access to them; and those who do are forbidden to even acknowledge their existence. “They’re in a weird category of executive legal authority,” Medish told me. “The way to think about this is a set of contingency plans, in effect draft orders based on contingency scenarios—what should the president do in order to maintain continuity of government?”

Over the past several decades, according to those who have studied this shadowy world, the Department of Defense has spent billions of dollars out of secret, black-budget funds, building up an infrastructure to implement PEADs and other continuity-of-government measures should an emergency situation........

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