Donald Trump

Political Wire - More than 230 doctors, nurses and health care professionals are calling on Donald Trump to release his medical records, arguing that he should be transparent about his health “given his advancing age,” CBS News reports.

Newsweek -  A former aide to Donald Trump issued a warning about the National Guard being deployed against American citizens during an interview with CNN, saying that Americans should take Trump's words seriously.

In an interview with FOX News' Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Trump responded to Joe Biden saying he's not confident the transfer of power after the election will be peaceful due to Trump previously disputing the results of the 2020 election...

Mark Esper, Trump's former secretary of defense, spoke to CNN's Kaitlan Collins about Trump's comments. "I think we should take those words seriously," he said.  When asked if he feared that Trump would try to utilize the military against US citizens, Esper said, "Yes, I do of course because I lived through that and I saw over the summer of 2020 where President Trump and those around him wanted to use the National Guard in various capacities and cities such as Chicago, Portland, and Seattle."

The comment relates to an allegation from his 2022 book A Sacred Oath that Trump made remarks about invoking the National Guard or the military to "shoot protestors" at the George Floyd marches in 2020.

Time - Locked away in a classified safe on the White House grounds is a stack of papers crafted over decades with the hope that no one would ever use them. It lists the extraordinary powers a President may be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack or other massive catastrophe. Among the select few who have been granted access to the nation’s most closely held secrets, the pages are known as the Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs. Some simply call it the “Doomsday Book.”

Over the decades, the book has come to include ready-made orders to suspend habeas corpus, the ancient and bedrock principle that those arrested appear before a judge, put parts of the country under military control, impose martial law, block Americans from traveling overseas, and restrict telecommunications, according to conversations with national security officials and analysis of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act filings by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and policy institute. The public doesn’t know the extent of those presumed powers or the situations under which a President might claim the authority to deploy them. Successive administrations have refused to let Congress see the documents, arguing that they are confidential legal advice for the President. When Donald Trump was in the Oval Office, members of his national security staff actively worked to keep him from learning the full extent of these interpretations of presidential authority, concerned that he would abuse them.

Now some former Trump advisors are raising the alarm about the dangers of Trump having access to the Doomsday Book in a second term. The former officials—which include Mark Harvey, who oversaw the Doomsday Book while on Trump’s National Security Council, and Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security—worry that Trump would use the powers in situations that fall far short of the crises they were drafted to address. Trump has a history of testing the limits of presidential powers, and in a second term would be free of many of the guardrails that restricted his first one. The Supreme Court ruled in July that Presidents have partial immunity for official actions. Trump’s senior advisors have a plan to purge the federal service of people unwilling to carry out his orders. “He’s going to be surrounded by a set of people that would say, ‘You have the power to do this,’” says Harvey. “Frankly, if he says, ‘Yes,’ and there are people that go do it, what’s to stop him?”