Peril

by Bob Woodward

“We’ve been duped,” Esper said to Milley as they walked to the church. “We’re being used.” Milley agreed completely. Milley turned to his personal security chief and said, “This is fucked up and this is a political event and I’m out of here. We’re getting the fuck out of here. I’m fucking done with this shit.” Milley peeled off from the group.

In 45 seconds, Milley realized he had made a mistake that threatened to compromise his most prized possession, forged over decades: his integrity and independence as the senior military officer in the United States of America. Walking with Trump when he was on a political mission, even for a split second, was utterly wrong. This is my Road to Damascus moment, Milley thought, feeling as if he was looking into a personal abyss.

Milley was not at the church when Trump stood for about two minutes, holding a Bible uncomfortably and waving it around. But it did not matter. The damage was done. The president had misused him and politicized the U.S military. They had become Trump’s pawns.

But Esper was more worried the most highly regarded institution in the country, the finely tuned and proudly nonpartisan military machine, was in jeopardy of being swept into a political storm. The republic seemed a little wobbly. How could he calm things down? How could he break what could only be described as a fever?

He had a feeling for why Trump did it: He still felt embarrassment about going down into the White House bunker. He wanted to show strength.

Dozens of National Guard troops in body armor—with their faces almost completely covered with gray masks and dark sunglasses—were later photographed on the Lincoln Memorial steps. They looked menacing, a militarized version of Trump’s law-and-order declaration.

The next day, June 2, Milley issued a one-page memo, “SUBJECT: Message to the Joint Force,” to the chiefs of all the military services and top combatant commands. It was a reminder to the military of their duty, and a recentering for himself, one day after the chaos alongside Trump in Lafayette Square. Near his signature, Milley scrawled out an additional message in longhand: “We all committed our lives to the idea that is America—we will stay true to that oath and the American people.”

“The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism. To deal with the growing economic inequality in our nation. And to deal with the denial of the promise of this nation to so many.”

Esper was flustered on June 3. With protests continuing in Washington, Trump still wanted 10,000 active-duty troops deployed to the city.

The 1968 riots erupted amid similar plagues of urban poverty, racism and anger over police brutality. Putting active-duty military in the streets, in an age of social media and ...

Esper decided he would declare publicly and unequivocally that he saw no reason to invoke the Insurrection Act.

“I’ve always believed and continue to believe that the National Guard is best suited for performing domestic support to civil authorities, in support of local law enforcement,” Esper said. “I say this not only as a secretary of defense, but also as a former soldier and a former member of the National Guard.

“The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.”

“The president is really pissed,” Mark Meadows, the White house chief of staff, said within minutes to Esper. “And really mad. He is going to rip your face off.”

When they walked into the Oval Office, almost everyone there had their head down, looking at their shoes.

“What did you do?” Trump yelled. “Why did you do that?” “Mr. President, I told you,” Esper said. “What I said before is I do not believe that this situation calls for invocation of the Insurrection Act. I think it would be terrible for the country and terrible for the military.” “You took away my authority!” Trump screamed. “Mr. President, I did not take away your authority. That is your authority. I offered my views on it and whether or not I would support it.”

Esper pulled a transcript of his press conference from his binder. He had highlighted his comments on the Act and slapped it on the Resolute Desk. He pushed it toward the president. “That’s what I said!”

“Who do you think you are?” Trump screamed at Esper. “You took away my authorities. You’re not the president! I’m the god damn president.” Milley, sitting silently next to Esper, watched Trump carefully. He believed the escalation and rage he was witnessing firsthand was disturbing, another face-off that reminded him of Full Metal Jacket.

Milley liked to think he and Esper had not subverted the authority of the president but fulfilled their duty to provide him with the best, unvarnished advice. They had a constitutional obligation to ensure the president was fully informed on his options. But once Trump decided and issued an order, they were required to execute it.

The only exception was an illegal, immoral or unethical order.

“We checkmated him,” Milley thought with tentative relief. They had tied Trump’s hands, outplayed him, and that was what made him so enraged.

General McKenzie, a Marine with vast command experience, began to review the options for withdrawing from Afghanistan, one of Trump’s central campaign promises. The generals kept arguing they wanted to fight the terrorists in Afghanistan and not in the homeland. They regularly invoked the memory of the September 11 plot, which had originated in Afghanistan, and argued that the U.S. troop presence was an insurance policy against another 9/11 attack.

“Tell him the cost.” “Tell him casualties.” “Tell him how much time.” “How many ships get sunk?”’ “And how many troops die?” “How many pilots get shot down?” “How many civilian casualties?”

“How long do you think this is going to take?” “Is it 30 days or 30 years?” “Is this going to be another war?”

“It’s easy to get into a war,” Milley interjected, using one of his and Esper’s favorite lines. “But it’s hard to get out of a war.”

Over the years, Milley had studied World War I. The trigger had been the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.

Milley understood the ridicule. He had been photographed in battle fatigues alongside a president who was intent on politicizing the military. It was a fiasco.

“Should I resign?” he asked Colin Powell, who had been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush. “Fuck no!” Powell said. “I told you never to take the job. You never should have taken the job. Trump’s a fucking maniac.”

Milley decided to apologize publicly but did not give Trump advance warning. On June 11, at a videotaped talk at the National Defense University graduation, Milley said, “As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched, and I am not immune. “As many of you saw, the result of the photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week, that sparked a national debate about the role of the military in civil society,” he said. “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I’ve learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it. “Embrace the Constitution, keep it close to your heart. It is our North Star.”

“Hey, aren’t you proud of walking with your president?” Trump asked. “To the church?” Milley asked. Yes, Trump said. “Why did you apologize?” “Mr. President, it’s got nothing to do with you actually.” Trump looked skeptical. “It had to do with me,” Milley said. “It had to do with this uniform. Had to do with the traditions of the United States military and that we are an apolitical organization. “You’re a politician,” Milley said. “You’re a political actor. For you to do it, that’s your call. But I cannot be part of political events, Mr. President. It’s one of our long-standing traditions.” “Why did you apologize?” the president asked again. “That’s a sign of weakness.” “Mr. President,” he said, looking directly at Trump, “not where I come from.” He was a Boston-area native. “Where I was born and how I was raised is when you make a mistake, you admit it.”

Trump later called Milley twice to inquire about how the military should deal with the issue of Confederate flags, statues and military bases named after Confederate generals. Milley said he favored making changes.

“We’re not going to ban Confederate flags. It’s Southern pride and heritage.”

“I’ve already told you twice, Mr. President. Are you sure you want to hear it again?” Yeah, go ahead, Trump said. “Mr. President,” Milley said, “I think you should ban the flags, change the names of bases, and take down the statues.” He continued, “I’m from Boston, these guys were traitors.”

“Interestingly,” Milley said of the nearly 500 Confederate soldiers buried there, “they’re arranged in a circle and the names on the gravestones are facing inward, and that symbolizes that they turned their back on the Union. They were traitors at the time, they are traitors today, and they’re traitors in death for all of eternity. Change the names, Mr. President.”

Without saying anything, Trump jumped to the next topic that came to mind. David Urban, the lobbyist and Trump ally close to Esper, later tried another approach to Trump. “If you don’t do this,” he said, encouraging the name changes, “the Democrats are going to rename them.”

Urban asked, are you familiar with the USNS Harvey Milk? “What’s that?” Trump asked. “It’s a U.S. Navy ship named after a gay city councilman in San Francisco” who was assassinated in 1978. “Do you think Democrats or Republicans did that?” “Okay. All right,” Trump grunted. “Let me think about it.”

“My obligation to the American people is to make sure that we don’t have an unnecessary war overseas. And that we don’t have the unlawful use of American force on the streets of America. We’re not going to turn our guns on the American people and we’re not going to have a ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario overseas.” Wag the Dog was a 1997 movie about a president using war to distract from a scandal.

“And the watchword of the day is steady in the saddle. We’re going to keep our eye on the horizon. And we’re going to do what’s right for the country, no matter what the cost is to ourselves.”

A large rally at Tulsa, Oklahoma’s 19,000-seat BOK Center was scheduled for June 20, his first in 60 days. City health officials, however, worried about a “super-spreader event,” and urged him to cancel it. A day before, Trump told Woodward in an interview the rally would be a huge success.

“I have a rally tomorrow night in Oklahoma,” Trump said. “Over 1.2 million people have signed up. We can only take about 50, 60 thousand. Because, you know, it’s a big arena, right? But we can take 22,000 in one arena, 40,000 in another. We’re going to have two arenas loaded. But think of that. Nobody ever had rallies like that.”

At the rally, the arena was only about half-filled, if that, with a sea of empty blue seats facing Trump, partly the result of a social media prank organized by teenage Trump critics. Thousands of the...

“Biggest fucking mistake,” Trump said at a meeting in the Oval Office. “I shouldn’t have ever done that fucking, fucking rally,” calling Parscale a “fucking moron.” Parscale was fired as campaign manager July 15 and demoted to senior adviser.

“If you are perceived as having failed during a time of crisis, you cannot come back. Think Neville Chamberlain or Herbert Hoover,” Morris wrote in one summer email to Trump’s senior advisers, referring to the British prime minister known for his disastrous meetings with Hitler and the president remembered for the Great Depression.

On August 7, he decided on an apparent whim to hold a news conference at his New Jersey golf club. The pandemic “is disappearing,” he insisted. “It’s going to disappear.” Cases in the U.S. had reached nearly 4.9 million confirmed cases—and over 160,000 deaths. Schools were, for the most part, not scheduled to reopen.

“The deep state,” Trump tweeted two weeks later, “or whoever, over at the FDA, is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed and saving lives!” The “whoever” was Dr. Stephen Hahn, 60, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

A Trump appointee, Hahn had been the prestigious chief medical executive of the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas and had published more than 220 pee...

“He definitely wanted me to speed up, and he wanted the data. He wanted information so that he could talk to the president,” Hahn said to a colleague. “When I talked to him about the process we were using, he would mention that he worked for some consulting firm and was experienced in, you know, process and process improvement. And that we had gotten it all wrong and we had too many steps involved in this analysis. “He didn’t bother to ask questions about why certain steps were needed. He didn’t see that there was any validity to what I was saying with respect to our process.”

“I want to reiterate that no one is blocking anything,” Hahn said. Producing a vaccine is a complicated procedure governed by laws, and the vaccine manufacturers and government agencies were already fast-tracking the process at record speed, working in partnership with the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” initiative.

“We are not slowing down enrollment of the trials. We’re trying our best in terms of getting data and information,” he said. This has nothing to do with politics. He tried to explain the clinical trial process to Trump.