Peril

by Bob Woodward

Trump didn’t want to give them comfort at all. These people were mostly Democrats, Trump believed, and if they didn’t have citizenship, they couldn’t vote.

“If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would’ve been in jail a long time ago” with 50-year sentences, he said. “People should be going to jail for this stuff.… This was all Obama. This was all Biden.” He was referring to the investigation being run by Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was probing how the FBI handled its look into the Trump campaign and alleged Russian collusion.

“I know people want accountability and we’re working on that, but it’s not going to be, we’re not doing this politically and it’s not going to be tit for tat,” Barr told Trump. And he reminded the president that the Supreme Court had recently ruled that not everything considered an abuse of power legally equates to a crime. Trump said he hated that answer.

His six-point lead in March 2020 was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s at that same marker in 2016.

But the strategy of letting Trump run against himself seemed to be working. Biden’s lead widened to double digits as the president continued to mismanage the pandemic. At a press conference on April 23, 2020, Trump mused about injecting bleach to fight the virus.

Unknown to the public and media, Biden was receiving daily briefings on the virus from two of the country’s top medical experts: Dr. Vivek Murthy, Obama’s former surgeon general, and Dr. David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, known for his war against tobacco.

Each day, Murthy and Kessler prepared a written Covid-19 report for Biden based on the most up-to-date information, gleaned from their hours of research on the phone with government and industry experts around the country and supplemented with data provided by a small team of confidential volunteers who scoured public and private information. Initially, the daily report ran up to 80 pages with maps, charts and diagrams.

Kessler and Murthy were both deeply alarmed by Trump’s attitude and failure to comprehend what he and the world were facing.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward in a March 2020 interview. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

“So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cas...

Trump shut down the country a week later, but almost immediately began talking about opening it back up. “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this,” Trump said on March 23, during a White House pr...

Biden dove into the science with Murthy and Kessler, seeking a daily tutorial. He was a question machine. He asked, how does the virus attack the body?

Droplets from an infected person’s cough or sneeze, or even normal breath, enter the nose and throat and attach to the plentiful cell-surface receptors called ACE2, taking over the cell and multiplying, they told him. Since the lungs are like a respiratory tree ending in small air sacs, also rich in the ACE2 receptors, the virus moves there and can destroy the lung cells.

They also described how the virus can attack different cell types and tissues, including b...

There are two types, the doctors said. The first was an adenovirus-based vaccine that enables the cells to produce spike proteins that build up antibodies, effec...

The second was the mRNA—the “m” is for messenger. This vaccine activates immune responses by giving cells the instructions to produce a spike protein. It’s like a recipe of your DNA. The body then remembers how to fight off the virus if later infected. The mRNA formulation can be chan...

During an interview with Trump on March 19, Woodward asked the president if he ever sat down with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to get a tutorial on the science behind the virus. “Yes, I guess,” Trump said, “but honestly there’s not a lot of time for that, Bob. This is a busy White House. We’ve got a lot of things happening. And then this came up.”

Murthy was surprised at the level of detail Biden wanted. He picked through their explanations with more questions. Why does the virus affect people of color, Black Americans and Brown Americans, more severely? The doctors explained that entrenched inequities in health care, education and financial resources made already vulnerable populations more vulnerable. Black and Brown people were exceedingly more likely to be hospitalized or die from the virus.

Murthy could see that candidate Biden seemed to understand that the virus was going to define not just his campaign, but if he won, his presidency.

Murthy was “Mr. Bedside Manner,” with a soothing voice. As a practicing physician, he had learned to spend abundant time listening to patients because he found they often gave an accurate self-diagnosis.

He would write a book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, and discussed with Biden how loneliness and isolation affects mental and physical health.

It was evident, he said, the virus was isolating people and affecting their mental health. Children missed the social contact in classrooms, as did office workers. The pandemic was eating away at the social fabric, Biden said.

In late May, angry protests erupted in more than 140 cities across the country. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had been caught on video pressing his knee on the neck of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, for seven minutes and 46 seconds, killing him.

In an interview at the time, Trump told Woodward, “These are arsonists, they’re thugs, they’re anarchists and they’re bad people. Very dangerous people. “These are very well-organized. Antifa’s leading it,” Trump said, pointing his finger at the anti-fascist movement that had confronted white supremacists and others.

Several colleagues believed he was responsible for stoking and spinning up the president about the violence.

He seemed to forever be lingering in the Oval Office, waiting for an opportunity to push his agenda.

“Mr. President,” Miller said, piping up from one of the Oval Office couches, “they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.”

Milley spun around from his seat in front of the Resolute Desk. “Shut the fuck up, Steve. “Mr. President,” Milley said turning back to Trump, “they are not burning it down.” His extended hands were flat in front of him, and he raised them up to his shoulders and slowly lowered them in a calming motion. He cited information from the daily SECRET report.

“Mr. President, there are about 276 cities in America with over 100,000 people. There were two cities in the last 24 hours that had major protests,” he said. “Elsewhere, it was 20 protesters to 300.” While images of burning and violence had been on television, many of the protests were peaceful—about 93 percent of them, according to a later nonpartisan report. “They used spray paint, Mr. President,” Milley said. “That’s not insurrection. That guy up there.” He pointed to the portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the wall in the Oval Office. “That guy up...

“We’re a country of 330 million people. You’ve got these penny packet protests,” Milley said, saying the situation was not even close to being as threatening as the 1968 riots in Washington, D.C., and elsewher...

He had also once told Miller to shut the fuck up.

“Keith,” Milley said, “this is nothing like 1968. You were Lieutenant Kellogg in 1968 sitting on top of one of these buildings collocated with the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne.” President Lyndon B. Johnson had deployed combat troops into Washington. “This isn’t even on the same level of the 1968 stuff when tens of thousands of protesters and rioters are going through Detroit and Chicago and L.A.” “That’s right, Mr. President,” Kellogg said. The protests should be monitored, Milley said. “We should pay attention to it. It’s important.” But it was an issue for local police and local law enforcement, mayors and governors. “It is not an issue for the United States military to deploy forces on the streets of America, Mr. President.”

Milley then carefully broached the issue of systemic racism and policing with Trump. “That’s pent up in communities that have been experiencing what they perceive to be police brutality,” he said. Trump didn’t say anything.

By June 1, 2020, Trump was furious. The protests had continued to grow in size and intensity across the country. Trump had agitated all weekend about the loud protests at the White House gates. A pedestrian area off 16th Street, leading up to the White House, which would soon be renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza,”...

The previous evening, May 31, a fire had been lit in the basement nursery of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, barely 1,000 feet from the White House and often called the Church of Presidents. At one point, th...

Trump told them he wanted a law-and-order crackdown—10,000 active-duty, regular troops in the city. He asked about the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law which gave the president the authority to use active-duty troops domestically by simply declaring an insurrection.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was fielding most of Trump’s questions. Esper knew that Trump’s “we” meant “he.”

“Mr. President, there is no need to call up the Insurrection Act,” Esper said. “The National Guard is on the ground and more suited.” The National Guard, comprised of volunteer reservists, often helped with national disasters.

“Mr. President,” Barr said, “if it comes to keeping law and order on the streets, I would not hesitate to use regular troops, believe me, if we had to. But we don’t have to. They’re not necessary,” he said. “You got a lot of stuff going on in different cities, but they’re manageable, if the cities step up. They have the adequate resources to do it, especially if they use their National Guard or their state police. “It looks like a lot because of the way the media is covering it. But some of these cities are like 300 people on a street corner and a burning car in the background. You don’t need the 82nd Airborne Division.”

He wanted the storied 82nd Airborne, stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the military’s elite crisis responder, to arrive in Washington before sunset when a protest was planned in Lafayette Square, the seven-acre park between the White House and St. John’s Church.

Esper explained to Trump the 82nd was trained to take the fight to the enemy with the biggest, most modern weapons. They were not trained in crowd control and civil unrest. ...

He needed the president to calm down.

Neither he nor Esper wanted a potentially bloody, unpredictable street confrontation between Black Lives Matter protesters and highly lethal, combat-trained U.S. military forces.

On the call, he told the governors they should forcefully crack down on their demonstrators. There was none of his usual cajoling. His tone was belligerent. “You have to dominate,” Trump told them, almost issuing a command. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate, and you have to arrest people, and you have to try people and they have to go to jail for long periods of time.”

Esper called the governors of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Eventually, he and Lengyel convinced at least ten states to send Guard units. Esper did not tell them that Trump wanted to flood the city with active-duty forces if they did not move quickly.

“The president wants you at the White House.” Once he arrived in the West Wing, Esper asked, “Where’s the meeting?” Sir, there is no meeting. What do you mean there is no meeting? So Esper waited.

Around 6:30 p.m., U.S. Park Police led a group of law enforcement officers, in riot gear and on horseback, into the crowd, and began forcefully clearing protesters from Lafayette Square. While the push was planned days earlier with the intent of building a fence around the park, it quickly unraveled into a chaotic scene.

At 6:48 p.m., after the protesters were dispersed, Trump spoke for seven minutes in the Rose Garden at the White House. “I will fight to protect you. I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters,” he said, pledging to control the “riots and lawlessness that has spread throughout our country.

“If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents,” he said, “then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them. “As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property.”

“Line up for what?” Esper asked. Well, sir, we are going to walk across Lafayette Square, the aide said. The president wants to go through the park and see St. John’s Church. He wants you all, he wants his cabinet members, to join him.