Trump Could ‘Turn Off the Internet’ in His Second Term, Former DHS Official Warns
That's just one extraordinary presidential power ripe for abuse, ex-chief of staff says
Among the drastic and authoritarian actions he could take if reelected as president, Donald Trump could sever connection to the Internet, according to a former top official in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The former president and his surrogates are increasingly admitting to authoritarian tendencies if he were to defeat President Biden in next year's elections.
Trump is the distant frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination as he seeks a nearly unprecedented return to the White House four years after his 2020 defeat.
And the office of the president has access to some extraordinary — and little-known — powers which Trump could abuse, said Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff of DHS in Trump's administration before becoming a loud critic of the former president.
“I think Americans still don’t understand the full extent of the president’s powers and things Donald Trump could do — bubble-wrapped in legalese — that would be damaging to the republic,” Taylor said this week in an on-camera appearance with MSNBC. “And one of those that I’ve noted is there’s something in the White House called the Doomsday Book.
“And for the first time, DHS gave authorization for me to mention this publicly, and the fact that there are concerns that that book — which is supposed to be used to protect the country in instances of armed foreign invasion or rebellion, it’s the president’s most extraordinary powers — could be picked up by Trump and used for domestic political purposes,” he added. “He could invoke powers we’ve never heard a president of the United States invoke, potentially to shut down companies, or turn off the Internet, or deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil.
“We don’t know, because the things that are in there, the emergency powers of the president, aren’t widely known to the American people.”
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