The Scenario Is the Warning

An abridged version of the author’s “Emergency Planning: The president is Preparing to Challenge 2026 Midterms. The Country Can Still Act to Protect Them,.” Published by The Washington Spectator

You don’t need certainty about how a crisis unfolds to know preparation is essential.

Most Americans have never heard of Presidential Emergency Action Documents.

Known as PEADs, they are secret directives prepared by presidents for catastrophic national emergencies: war, cyberattack, mass unrest, infrastructure collapse, or threats to continuity of government. Their contents remain classified. But declassified materials and historical records show that emergency planning has long contemplated extraordinary executive powers: detention outside ordinary criminal process, control of transportation and communications, seizure of facilities, deployment of federal personnel inside the United States, and temporary concentration of power in the executive branch during periods of declared crisis.

Under normal circumstances, these authorities are contingency planning.

Under abnormal political circumstances, they could become something else.

President Trump enters the 2026 midterms facing the real possibility of losing one or both houses of Congress. A Democratic victory would likely bring investigations, subpoenas, aggressive oversight, and perhaps impeachment proceedings. Trump’s conduct after losing in 2020—pressuring state officials, refusing to concede, seeking to block certification, and continuing to claim elections he loses are rigged—suggests he does not necessarily regard adverse electoral outcomes as politically final if other instruments of power remain available.

Now imagine a plausible post-election scenario.

Democrats appear to win the House, maybe the Senate too. Trump declares the results fraudulent in selected jurisdictions and refuses to recognize key outcomes while federal investigations proceed. Republican allies in Congress insist disputed seats cannot be recognized until allegations of fraud, foreign interference, cyber manipulation, or domestic disorder are fully reviewed.

Millions of Americans would understand what was happening. They would protest.

That is where emergency powers could become decisive.

If protests spread—and if some become violent, or were portrayed as violent—the White House would declare a national emergency. Federal agencies would move not simply against protesters, but against organizers, donors, lawyers, labor networks, nonprofits, digital platforms, and elected allies accused of supporting disorder, insurrection, or interference with constitutional order. Arrests would begin. Funding would be frozen. Communications would be disrupted. Leaders could be detained, potentially in the new ICE detention infrastructure, while courts struggle to react and facts are created on the ground.

The theory would be temporary emergency action. The effect could be permanent constitutional damage.

The opposition would be forcibly repressed. Congress would organize under conditions shaped not by the voters’ will alone, but by fear, detention, and coercion. A new Congress would formally exist, but not as an independent branch capable of checking presidential power.

The president would have overturned the election through refusing to seat a Congress he finds contrary to his preferences, and then engineering a sequence of events that transforms his adversaries into what he already refers to as “domestic enemies,” and preventing them from taking power, including, as needed, arresting and imprisoning those who resist.

Could events unfold exactly this way? Scenarios are just scenarios. We cannot know ahead of time exactly which ones will play out in practice, and how. Could some version of it happen? Yes.

Even outside the context of an election crisis, we have already seen the Trump Administration investigate and in some cases actually bring criminal cases against former national security and intelligence officials, former federal law enforcement officials, sitting senators and representatives, state attorneys general, federal financial regulators, military leadership, and at least one sitting judge. The threat of the Trump Administration further criminalizing the opposition in the context of adverse elections, aided by the extraordinary powers of the PEADs, is profound.

Which is why preparation cannot begin in November 2026. It must begin now.

Governors, attorneys general, secretaries of state, legislative leaders, university presidents, labor organizations, business leaders, philanthropies, media organizations, and civic institutions should already be preparing for what happens if emergency powers are invoked after a contested election. That means pre-positioning legal teams in multiple jurisdictions, building communications systems that cannot be easily disrupted, identifying emergency funding for legal defense and civic mobilization, coordinating across state lines, and making public commitments in advance to honor lawfully certified election results.

Emergency planning is not alarmism. It is how democracies make power grabs less likely to succeed.

Jonathan M. Winer is the former Special Envoy for Libya and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement and a Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow at MEI. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.