Original subtitles

[ Explosion ]

[ People shouting ]

-2020 has just been one of the worst years

of American history. It's tragic.

It's absolutely tragic what has happened to this country.

-Americans have never felt so afraid and vulnerable.

-We have kind of lost the ability

to track how bad things are,

because every week, there's something new.

-Who do you serve?! Who do you protect?!

-Do something!

-But what if the worst is yet to come,

with no one in charge planning to help us?

-For over 70 years,

our leaders have told us one thing under the bright lights.

-The protection of the lives and property of Americans

is the responsibility of all public officials.

-Government's first duty is to protect the people.

-I care. We're trying.

-The country stands with you.

We'll do all in our power to help.

-But America's shadow government

has spent trillions of dollars on secret plans.

That serve one premise...

When the shit really hits the fan,

we're on our own.

-I have nothing. Nothing.

-For decades, the U.S. government invested

trillions of dollars in a secret plan to save itself

while the rest of us die.

♪♪

♪♪

-The most important decisions being made about the future

of the United States and the fate of the Earth

are being made in secret by a small elite.

-Engineers too sick to maintain the power grid?

The government's elite have massive generators.

Cellphone system craps out?

They've got their own secure network.

Supermarket shelves empty?

They've stockpiled enough food for years.

And don't get us started on toilet paper.

They've got a forest's worth stashed away.

-It's this massive secret project

that funneled unbelievable amounts of money

towards the survival

of the president and officials of government

and away from the betterment of American citizens' lives.

♪♪

-I would like to begin

by announcing some important developments

in our war against the Chinese virus.

-March 24, 2020.

President Trump holds a press conference

to propose an end date for the growing global crisis.

-Easter is our timeline.

What a great timeline that would be.

-My question is, you have two doctors on stage with you.

Have either of them told you that's a realistic timeline?

-I'd love to see it come even sooner,

but I just think it would be a beautiful timeline.

Joe?

-But even as the President

downplays the pandemic publicly...

♪♪

-It's going to disappear.

One day, it's like a miracle. It will disappear.

-Trump knows something that most Americans don't.

If the pandemic spirals out of control,

there are secret plans underway for him and his top officials,

even his immediate family,

to be evacuated to secure facilities

designed to withstand Armageddon.

-Thank you very much. Thank you.

-On the very same day that Trump was telling

the American people the pandemic

would magically disappear by Easter,

1,600 miles away,

a military team is settling into life underground.

-Cheyenne Mountain is one of the U.S. government's

three main doomsday bunkers.

-Garrett Graff is an historian and journalist.

His book, "Raven Rock,"

was the first in-depth look at the government's secret bunkers.

-Inside the Cheyenne Mountain bunker,

the U.S. government hid a team of military commanders.

Their mission... To man the nation's defense

if it goes full zombie apocalypse aboveground.

It's all part of a plan that was hatched 70 years ago.

-In the 1950s, the government came up with plans

for a Deep Underground Command Center,

where the president and, you know,

a few hundred staff members not only could take shelter

but also could direct a nuclear war.

-The plan is called Continuity of Government,

or COG.

-At any moment, we could see thousands of members

of the government completely wiped out,

but there's a secondary government, a shadow government,

that is ready to take over at a moment's notice.

♪♪

[ Explosion ]

-These weren't just run-of-the-mill bunkers.

Some of them were entire hollowed-out mountains

with small freestanding cities that could support a population

of even a thousand people for a month or longer.

♪♪

-The bunker system remained a secret

until 1974 when a commercial airliner

crashed into the side of a mountain in Virginia.

♪♪

The crash revealed a massive secret installation

deep inside the mountain, known as Mount Weather.

♪♪

-Mount Weather is now an unclassified facility.

Everybody knows about it.

But back then, it was highly secret.

It was heavily guarded. And it's where a continuity team

would go in the event of a nuclear war.

-The idea was that government officials could go there,

and they would be able to operate the government

even when almost everything else had been wiped off the planet.

-There would be interagency teams,

people from the State Department,

the Justice Department, the Pentagon, CIA,

and domestic agencies.

-Top civilian officials would hide away in Mount Weather.

But few knew there was another secret bunker.

♪♪

-Every so often, you bump up against

Continuity of Government plans.

Sometimes you would spot helicopters

practicing for evacuations in the skies over the city.

And every so often, in a bar,

an official would talk about the secret facilities

that they were whisked off to.

-Graff's discovery of this world, and the most secret

of these facilities, happened by accident.

-A colleague of mine found

a government-intelligence I.D. badge

on the floor of a parking garage.

On the back were directions.

[ Engine starts ]

And it just made me wonder, "What else is out there?"

So that launched me on this journey

to try to map this secret world out there

that I didn't realize ever existed.

And the biggest thing I found

was the doomsday facility known as Raven Rock.

-Raven Rock, like Area 51, remains one of

the U.S. government's most classified installations.

Could you describe Raven Rock to me?

Like, what it is and what it's for?

-No.

-Raven Rock is an underground backup Pentagon.

-It's the most unbelievable place you can imagine.

You're 768 feet below the surface.

-Don Cammel spent 3 1/2 years at Raven Rock

as part of the president's communication team.

He's never spoken on camera before

about his time working in the secret bunker.

-Basically, they carved out a city underground

that could survive a direct hit from a nuclear blast.

After you go through the security, you walk in,

and it's basically an underground tunnel.

There's a glass door that was 3 1/2-foot thick

that weighed 30 tons.

You go through, like, an airlock,

and they had two of those doors.

And then, you walk another half a mile.

-A half mile deeper into the mountain is the bunker itself.

-And you're going past five buildings.

Those represent the five rings of the Pentagon.

And each of those buildings are three stories tall,

and they probably have 50 to 80 offices per floor.

-The buildings are mounted on springs

to survive the shock waves from a nuclear blast.

-There's a common cafeteria

capable of serving 3,000 people

three meals a day for 30 days on lockdown.

They had a barbershop in there with one chair.

-It's got massive reservoirs, generators,

even a crematorium, if needed,

post office, medical facilities,

and emergency command and communication links

to the U.S. military all around the world.

-As part of the White House team,

Cammel had access to the most restricted part of the bunker,

the presidential suite.

-The presidential suite is a very secure area.

The other people in the site, they had no access.

And they were very, very curious

as far as what was behind the door.

The presidential bedroom was, of course, a king-size bed,

and then there was a separate kitchen set up in our suite

to feed 30 or 40 people.

The presidential office overlooked the war room,

which had the same display that was a duplicate

of what they had in the Pentagon.

We would look down, and, of course, they'd look up,

and they couldn't see through the glass

'cause it was a one-way glass.

-To understand why these bunkers were created,

you have to rewind to the 1950s.

♪♪

For some, it was America's golden age.

But it was also the dawn of a ruthless fight

for global supremacy...

-The United States and the Soviet Union

stand on the verge of direct military confrontation.

- in which both sides built up an arsenal

of spectacularly powerful weapons...

♪♪

that meant the next world war

would not last years but minutes.

-There might be as little as 15 minutes' notice

of an attack that could wipe out

much of civilization as we know it.

And so the Eisenhower administration began

an elaborate process of contingency planning.

And if we only had a few minutes,

then they didn't want to have any sort of layers

of review or approval that would slow down the process

of responding to a major emergency.

-To avoid mass panic, the U.S. government created

a nationwide civil-defense program.

-We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous.

Since it may be used against us,

we must get ready for it.

-Growing up in the 1950s, there were fallout shelters,

places where you would go if the nuclear war occurred.

And in those fallout shelters, there was water.

There were prescription drugs.

The notion really was that you could go there and survive.

-The government starts telling Americans that

not only can they survive a nuclear war,

but they could go on living their lives

as long as they come together in an unquestioning mass.

[ Explosion ]

-Duck and cover!

This family knows that even a thin cloth

helps protect them.

Even a newspaper can save you from a bad burn.

-But while the public was being told to build shelters

and duck under their desks,

the government elite were going to hide under tons of rock

and reinforced concrete.

-There was an awareness at the highest level

of the American government that these civil-defense drills

were really window dressing.

This was a massive, massive propaganda effort

that bore almost no relationship to reality whatsoever.

President Eisenhower knew that this was all bullshit.

He said things like, "If nuclear war comes,

there aren't going to be enough bulldozers

to scrape the bodies off the streets.

[ Explosion ]

♪♪

-If the Soviet bombs started dropping,

everyone was going to die.

Everyone, that is, but the chosen few.

The president and the government elite

would ride out Armageddon in massive nuclear-proof bunkers...

♪♪

while American citizens died in the millions.

And while the average American

was oblivious to this elitist double standard,

in other circles, it was famously mocked.

- "Dr. Strangelove," the Kubrick film,

does an amazing job of parodying the whole notion

of a nuclear bunker

and decisions being made by a small elite.

-Of course, it would be absolutely vital

that our top government and military men be included.

It will foster and impart the required principles

of leadership and tradition.

[ Grunts ]

-But the truth is even stranger than fiction.

The bunkers are just the beginning.

These secret government plans include a secret Air Force,

secret communication networks, a secret monetary system,

and a classified plan to suspend democracy itself.

And it all still exists

and could be put into action right now.

♪♪

-The U.S. government spent billions of dollars

to build a secret bunker system

to save themselves in the case of nuclear war.

One thing the system lacks is how to restrain

an out-of-control president with his finger on the button

from starting that war in the first place.

♪♪

July 2017... Kim Jong-un's regime

test-fires an intercontinental ballistic missile

capable of hitting the United States.

President Trump counters with a barrage of his own.

-North Korea best not make any more threats

to the United States.

They will be met with fire and fury

like the world has never seen.

-And a war of words quickly escalates

into a full-blown crisis.

-The United States has great strength and patience,

but if it is forced to defend itself,

we will have no choice

but to totally destroy North Korea.

-Meanwhile...

As the crisis mounts,

North Korea's propaganda machine goes into overdrive.

While Trump's late-night tweets caused many to fear

the United States is 140 characters away from war.

♪♪

-The president of the United States,

in a split second, without questioning,

can end the world itself,

which is a completely unprecedented

and disturbing development for an executive branch

which has grown in power and scope.

-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis

and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly

made a pact at the beginning of the Trump administration

to ensure that one of them was always available

to clarify any orders coming out of the White House.

-During the North Korean missile crisis,

James Mattis even sleeps in his clothes,

ready for action in a moment's notice.

But there's little they or any other top officials

can do to stop the president

if he wants to launch a nuclear strike.

-The United States is ready, willing, and able.

Rocket Man is on a suicide mission

for himself and for his regime.

-We have a president who is so dangerous

because this is a person who not only has unilateral authority

to use nuclear weapons but has multiple times now

and repeatedly shown a desire to do so.

At one point, he actually considered the idea

that a nuclear weapon could destroy a hurricane.

-If North Korea's Rocket Man actually launched

one of his nuclear missiles at the United States,

a secret evacuation plan would have kicked into gear.

To get the president and his shadow government

to the Raven Rock or Mount Weather Bunkers,

a vast secret transportation network was created.

You may know it as Marine One,

the helicopter that takes Trump golfing.

-Everyone sees us land on the White House lawn.

Shiny green-and-white helicopter

takes the president back and forth

to help him fulfill his executive agenda for that day.

-But Marine One is part of a fleet

of highly specialized aircraft

that have a much more serious function.

-We've taken those airframes and we've modernized it,

and we've hardened it against all kinds of threats.

The real bread and butter

comes from the communication equipment.

Our president can pick up that phone inside Marine One

and talk to any world leader, any combatant commander.

He can go through the Pentagon

and talk to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

-And if the president can't get to one of the secret bunkers,

an entire secret air force exists

to provide sanctuary in the skies.

-Right now, at this exact moment,

there's a plane sitting on a runway,

its engines are running, it's fully staffed.

It could be airborne in less than 15 minutes.

-Officially called Nightwatch aircraft,

they're known as the president's doomsday planes.

-They've been modified so much that the price tag on them

is about 10 times the normal cost

of a regular commercial 747.

-Manned by a crew of up to 114,

planes at 5,000 square feet of conference rooms,

communication centers, and private quarters.

To ensure electronics aren't fried

by an electromagnetic pulse from an atomic blast,

the planes are covered in wire mesh.

-Basically, it's a flying battle station.

The president can use it in times of war

to fight back against any adversary.

-And to order a retaliatory strike,

the president would turn to the world's most powerful briefcase.

-In a country that doesn't have crown jewels or a royal throne,

the physical manifestation of all of the president's

vast powers is embodied in the black briefcase

that is never more than a few steps away from the president.

♪♪

-The so-called nuclear football briefcase

is the closest thing to the mythical

and often misunderstood "button"

the president can push to unleash Armageddon.

-If the United States were under attack,

the president probably has 10 minutes,

8 minutes to make a decision about whether to retaliate

and about what form of retaliation to order.

Inside, there'd be a black book,

and the black book has visual representations

of what the different attack options would be,

maybe like the menu at restaurants

that show you the pictures of what you're going to order.

-He would communicate to the Pentagon, first of all,

who he was, authenticating himself with an elaborate code,

and then he would communicate the option he had chosen.

-9, 8, 7, 6...

-From the time that the president gives an order,

the first missiles will leave their silos

four minutes later.

♪♪

-And that decision would kill hundreds of millions of people.

And perhaps put the earth into a nuclear winter

for a decade or longer, destroying civilization.

He has to make that decision in a matter of minutes.

That's almost an impossible decision

for any human being to make.

-The nuclear football is based in trust.

It's the idea that the president

has the nation's best interests at heart,

that the president is the most logical

and calculating thinker that you can imagine.

All of that begins to fall apart if the president himself

is the threat to the nation.

-This wasn't the first time a seemingly unstable president

pushed the limits of America's doomsday machine.

-Nixon took the country and the world

to the brink of nuclear war

for no reason other than politics.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-October 27, 1969.

Hippies dancing in the street are oblivious to the fact

that their archenemy, President Richard Nixon,

has just ordered 18 nuclear-armed B-52 bombers

to take off and head towards the Soviet Union.

♪♪

-We want Nixon! We want Nixon!

-Like Trump, Nixon had run as the law-and-order candidate.

He also claimed to have a secret plan

to end the Vietnam War.

-For four years, we haven't had a moment of peace abroad.

For four years, we haven't had a moment of peace at home.

My friends, when it goes that far, it's time to make a change.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-But now the country and the war are spiraling out of control.

And the newly elected president is desperate.

♪♪

-Nixon decides to start acting

in a completely unpredictable manner.

He wants not just the Soviet Union

but the people of Vietnam to believe that he could unleash

the power of the nuclear bomb at any moment.

-He began loading up nuclear weapons on B-52s

and flying them in a way that suggested

that he was crazy enough to use them.

President Nixon believed that he could persuade the Soviets

that he was willing to use nuclear weapons,

that it might lead to a peaceful conclusion of the war.

-The challenge with that was that the other side

might believe that you would actually start a war.

♪♪

-Any miscalculation by the Soviets might have easily

tipped the world into a nuclear exchange.

And if the Soviets had believed Nixon was crazy enough

to start World War III,

they would have begun to unleash their vast nuclear arsenal.

♪♪

-Nuclear war is basically like a shootout in the Old West.

♪♪

Whoever shoots first...

has a better chance of survival.

[ Explosion ]

-With Soviet missiles raining down across the United States,

the American people would pay a heavy price

for Nixon poking the Soviet bear.

-They have the capability to wipe out New York,

Chicago, Los Angeles.

It would've been a cataclysmic war for the United States,

and there was no way that we could prevent that.

♪♪

[ Explosion ]

♪♪

-Scientists, led by Carl Sagan,

determined that a full-scale nuclear war

using hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons

couldn't be fought without effectively

destroying civilization

and perhaps destroying humanity as a species.

The survivors would envy the dead.

-The American people didn't know just how close

they came to Armageddon in October 1969.

The Soviets called Nixon's bluff

and didn't cave in to his provocation.

-It was a tactic that didn't work.

But the fact that he could do it at all is unbelievable.

-If the bombs had started dropping,

Nixon would've turned to the secret instruction manual

for handling such a massive national emergency

that would give him the right to rip up the Constitution

and throw away your rights.

And a version is still on the books

and available for our current president to use.

-When somebody's the president of the United States,

the authority is total.

But I have the right to do a lot of things

that people don't even know about.

The president of the United States calls the shots.

Most Americans don't realize the secret laws

and secret authorities

that have built up around the presidency.

-As a result of the Cold War, the American presidency

has grown in power exponentially,

in ways that the founders never could have possibly imagined.

-Then I have an Article II,

where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,

but I don't even talk about that.

-I can't think of any president who has ever claimed

that Article II of the Constitution

gives him the power to do whatever he wants.

But even then, he has the ability

to use secret legal memos and presidential orders,

known as Presidential Emergency Action Documents.

-The little-known Presidential Emergency Action Documents

are top-secret orders that grant the president vast,

sweeping powers in the case of a national emergency.

-These Presidential Emergency Action Documents

are sort of like a loaded weapon

that has never actually been deployed.

They are executive orders, proclamations, and directives

that are drafted in anticipation

of a range of worst-case scenarios,

ready for the president's signature in the event

that one of those scenarios were to come to pass.

What's extraordinary

about these Presidential Emergency Action Documents

is that none of them has ever been released or even leaked.

These documents are not shared with Congress,

even though they go to the heart of the government's plans

for responding to a major emergency.

-We don't know what the secret powers are,

we don't know when they could be invoked,

and we don't know what American democracy

would look like afterward.

-We have much less information about the contents of current

Presidential Emergency Action Documents,

but we do know what was in some of these

up through the early 1970s.

These purported to authorize martial law,

the roundup and detention of people listed

on an index of so-called subversives

that was maintained by the FBI, censorship of the press,

warrantless seizures of property,

and the suspension of habeas corpus by the president,

not by the Congress, as provided in the Constitution,

which basically means that people could be imprisoned

without judicial review.

These documents still exist,

and we know that there were 56 of them in 2018.

They are periodically revised and updated

to address current threats.

For example, a cyber attack, pandemics.

And it's not as if nuclear warheads have gone away.

We also know that the purpose of them

is to imagine the outer limits

of how far the president might possibly need to go

and to prepare for that scenario.

-With the power of life and death over the entire planet

and the ability to kick in secret laws

that could override the Constitution,

the office of the president of the United States

has been imbued with almost godlike powers.

To ensure there's always someone to wield

these incredible powers,

a vast system of presidential succession has been created.

-The goal was someone, somewhere,

was always ready to step into the presidency.

The president may die. The presidency always lives.

♪♪

-And having someone ready is never more important

than on the day all of the nation's elected officials

gather for the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear

-In that void of 7 hours and 32 minutes,

had catastrophe struck, I would've become the president.

♪♪

-"I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear..."

-I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear...

-"...that I will faithfully execute..."

- that I will faithfully execute...

-"...the office of president of the United States."

- the office of president of the United States.

-January 20, 2017.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the 45th president

after a campaign that divided the nation.

-So help me God.

-Congratulations. [ Cheers and applause ]

-If anything happened to the man elected president,

another man is waiting under guard, far from the Capitol.

-While the world is watching in Washington,

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson

has been hidden away at a secure location,

ready to take over if something terrible happens in Washington.

He's the latest in a long line of designated survivors,

officials picked in advance

in the presidential line of succession

to ensure that, at high-profile events,

there's always one person ready to step in

if the unthinkable happens.

-Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson,

was once one of the federal lawyers who signed off

on the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

-On January 20, 2017, I actually had a fantasy

about how that day was going to go for me.

I was very much looking forward to leaving office

with the rest of the Obama administration.

And I actually had an app on my phone

that counted down the days, hours, minutes

until January 20, 2017, at noon.

But it didn't happen that way. At the very last minute,

I was asked to be the designated survivor.

-The idea of the designated survivor

is a relatively recent invention.

The recognition that the speed and terror of nuclear weapons

in the modern age

requires the ability to hand off the presidency

in a matter of minutes.

The goal was someone, somewhere,

was always ready to step into the presidency.

-Thank you.

-There is a fair amount of thinking that goes into it,

and the designated survivor would,

in the event all the others

in the presidential line of succession ahead of him or her,

would assume the office of the presidency,

-The line of succession moves down through the cabinet

in the order in which the cabinet departments

were created,

beginning with the Secretary of State.

And it goes through all the federal departments

until it gets to the Secretary of Homeland Security.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-In that void of 7 hours and 32 minutes,

had catastrophe struck...

-What a great honor to be able to introduce

for the first time ever, anywhere, the 45th president

of the United States of America, Donald J...

- I would've become the president.

-While the American people

had voted a Republican president into the office,

if the unthinkable had happened that day,

the president of the United States

would've been a Democrat and a man

who never attempted to run for president.

But while the designated survivor

is a publicly known plan

to ensure the survival of the presidency during major events,

there's another secret plan that goes even further.

-The Continuity of Government plans

ensured the line of presidential succession in a way

that would be unrecognizable to most Americans.

-The idea was that the scale of damage could be so great

that everybody in the constitutional

line of succession would be gone,

and they would have to reach way beyond

the constitutional order of succession.

-In the event of a surprise catastrophic attack

on Washington, a host of officials

far from the Capitol would suddenly raise their hands

and announce themselves as the country's new leadership.

-People you might have heard of, like United States attorney

for the district of Illinois in Chicago,

but you would never imagine that that person

would be president of the United States.

But under these plans, there was an entire government

that was built separate and apart

from what's contemplated in the Constitution.

-Whether you come to office

because of the death of the president

or the resignation of the president

or election by the people,

you have all of the trappings, the authority,

and the responsibilities of the office,

including being the commander-in-chief

of the armed forces.

-And the president retains all those trappings,

responsibilities, and authority even after losing an election.

-In the early hours of November the 4th,

the man once rated the most popular

United States president in history conceded defeat.

-The United States is unusual in having

a particularly long period

between the election of one president

and the departure of another president.

It's about 2 1/2 months.

What that means is, you have a commander in chief

who may have been rejected by the American people

but still has the sole authority to use nuclear weapons,

has tremendous power.

-America might face one of the most perilous chapters

of its history

as a man who has shown no respect for democracy

or our democratic institutions faces a lame-duck period

where he has all of the authority of the office

and none of the sense of responsibility.

-Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory

until the election has been independently certified?

-If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated,

I can't go along with that.

♪♪

-Donald Trump may end up losing the election.

But during the so-called lame-duck period,

a president of the United States retains

all the vast powers the office has accumulated

over the last 70 years.

♪♪

-So, there is this period of three months

during which a president who has been defeated

or whose second term has expired or is about to expire,

nonetheless is in charge of the military.

Let's imagine a scenario

where a president loses his bid for re-election

and then loses his mind,

in part because of the defeat, in part

because of some previously existing mental problem.

He loses control.

If a president rolled out of bed on a Monday

and wanted to end the world and called in the code,

there was no war going on, our hope would be

that the military officers receiving the go codes

might ask for higher authority or simply say,

"No, Mr. President, that is not a legal order."

But technically, they don't have to.

If the president says go, they're supposed to go.

-We've seen so many

of the institutions of the United States buckle

Under President Trump... The courts, the Senate,

the Justice Department.

Maybe I'm overly hopeful,

but the military seems to be one of the last institutions

that he hasn't managed to corrupt.

-It wouldn't be the first time that a president's ability

to unleash America's nukes was restrained.

-For over four months, Watergate has dominated the news media.

It is my constitutional responsibility

to defend the integrity

of this great office against false charges.

-As Watergate began to take down the Nixon presidency,

Richard Nixon began to unravel.

His drinking was out of control.

He was wandering the halls of the White House,

talking to the portraits and talking to himself

and talking to God.

He would talk about picking up a phone and bombing his enemies.

-So Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger

let it be known to the Joint Chiefs of Staff

that any order to use nuclear weapons by Nixon

had to go through him.

Now, technically, if Schlesinger had overruled Nixon

on the use of nuclear weapons,

it would have been an act of mutiny.

But he was sufficiently concerned about Nixon's

mental health that he wanted to make sure

there wouldn't be a catastrophe.

♪♪

-Who do you protect?! Who do you protect?!

-But even if nuclear war

can be averted by clearheaded officials...

-We step back! Now you step back!

- all lame-duck presidents have the ability to invoke

the top-secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents.

-We know that the Department of Justice

was in the process of updating these documents

as recently as 2018.

So the question becomes,

what does the Trump administration view

as the outer limits of presidential power?

-When somebody's the president of the United States,

the authority is total.

And that's the way it's got to be.

- Your authority's total? - Total.

-That is not true.

Who told you the president has the total authority?

-Enough?

-Trump has repeatedly hinted about the secret powers

and the unimaginable capabilities

that he could have in an emergency.

The challenge is, we don't literally know what those are.

-The worst-case scenario is if this president

were to exploit the actual emergency presented by COVID-19

and/or to try to manufacture emergencies,

maybe by provoking violence in relation

to some of the protests around police brutality

and to use those situations as a pretext to deploy the military

or to engage in other extreme uses of emergency powers

in a way that could undermine

a fair and free election and undermine our democracy.

-They say that they're going to threaten riots

if they lose on Election Night.

What are you going to do?

-We'll put them down very quickly if they do that.

- How you gonna do that? - We have the right to do that.

We have the power to do that if we want.

Look, it's called insurrection.

We just send in, and we do it very easy.

-In that extreme situation,

if all of these powers were deployed,

what you're looking at

is a democracy turning into an autocracy.

-We're entering a very perilous chapter of American history...

-You're disrespecting the flag!

- when you can't trust that the president

is acting in the nation's best interests.

[ Explosion ]

-Any attempt to really impose martial law,

I think, would ultimately fail,

but I could imagine the arrest of key members of Congress

or leading figures in the United States

that would profoundly harm our democratic systems

even more severely than they are right now.

-Jews will not replace us!

Jews will not replace us!

-By the way, I can't even [bleep] believe

that we're talking about these scenarios.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

We're talking about a scenario

of a president imposing martial law.

The fact that this conversation is even happening

is a sign of how bad things are in the United States right now.

-We need to look at how presidents can be restrained

and how bad-faith actors can be restrained,

because here we have a president...

God knows what he could possibly get into in two months,

particularly being a scorned, unstable, healthy individual.

-These plans and powers enable the president to cause

as much chaos and damage as he wants,

knowing he'll be safe down in his bunker,

while above him, the rest of us are left to die.

Since the beginning of the Nuclear Age in 1945,

decisions of incredibly profound importance

have been made by a small number of policy makers

in Washington, D.C., mainly in secret.

And it's really important that the American people

understand these issues,

educate themselves about these issues,

and be part of the process of debating them

and making the decisions,

because the consequences of these decisions

are almost unimaginable.

♪♪

-2020 is the beginning of the age of catastrophe.

It's kind of the future warning us.

-All we want is justice! We can't get justice?!

-There's so much uncertainty, discontent, fear.

[ Explosion ]

-The apocalypse is sort of closing in on us from all sides.

-It turns out none of the plans that we had developed

during the Cold War would work.

-Everybody out!

-Because you can lock on to him, shoot him, shoot him, shoot him.

-We've seen it with earthquakes, hurricanes, and now a pandemic

just how wide the chasm is between the powerful

and the rest of us.

-It is fascinating how this disaster

seemed to disproportionately affect poor black people.

-I think if we had a major catastrophic event,

you could see America would do well

in the first 7 to 10 days.

-End the shutdown now!

-Then you're going to immediately fall into chaos.

[ Glass shatters ]

-Back up! Back up!

-The world is kind of on fire.

And the elites are retreating into bunkers.

♪♪