Among the many ways in which Donald Trump’s presidency has deranged our traditional understanding of the way the world works, there’s what might be termed the great ever-renewable metanarrative of Trumpism: the sense of perpetual hair-trigger emergency that now surrounds our executive branch and the siege-minded right wing of our politics generally. From the random threats of tariffs on Mexican trade to a non-existent border crisis to the founding of voter fraud commissions to the vicious, child-killing protocols of family separation at the border, the Trump moment perhaps represents the high-water mark of scarcely modulated panic as a governing philosophy.

But, as is the case with many other Trump pathologies, this one is deeply rooted in the national right-wing psyche, and draws much of its force from the cult of unchallenged executive power that was erected around the high-paranoia prosecution of the American Cold War. The convergence of the apocalyptic executive prerogative founded in the 1950s with the spiteful, suggestible, and counter-empirical crusading spirit of Trumpism has produced a little-noted and all-too-real crisis in the conduct of the American presidency, which we’re now watching unfold in elaborate and chilling new variations in real time.

And the most potentially disastrous product of this unholy alliance would be a vigilante state empowered to apprehend and detain designated enemies of the state—in Trump’s case, undocumented immigrants—at its virtual whim. This might sound like alarmist hyperbole cribbed from an episode of Black Mirror or The X-Files, but the simple truth is that all of the legal authority for a United States president to order federal law enforcement, or even the military, to arrest and detain non-citizens is already written up. It exists, even if nowhere else, in the sheaf of emergency legal orders to be signed by the acting president in the wake of a nuclear war or other national emergency.

Rounding up non-citizens is among the very first things a post-disaster government was expected to need to do after such an event. And there is no doubt that today’s federal government needs no paper forms to gather information on who lives where; the National Security Agency and other data-defense entities are widely and credibly believed to have unimaginable amounts of vital information about, well, everyone.

So: What, exactly, is a federal emergency? Contingency planning has historically been drawn up around the unspoken assumption that the emergency was a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. That one is obvious. The real question, the one that has no simple answer, is what else counts as an emergency.