Peril

by Bob Woodward

The Chinese already were on high alert about U.S. intentions. On October 30, four days before the presidential election, sensitive intelligence showed that the Chinese believed the U.S. was plotting to secretly attack them. The Chinese thought that Trump in desperation would create a crisis, present himself as the savior, and use the gambit to win reelection.

Milley had witnessed up close how Trump was routinely impulsive and unpredictable. Making matters even more dire, Milley was certain Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.

China was, by far, the most sensitive and dangerous relationship in American foreign policy. But U.S. intelligence showed the January 6 riot had not only stirred up China but caused Russia, Iran, as well as other nations to go on high alert to monitor the American military and political events in the United States.

“Aggressively watch everything, 360,” Milley said to Haspel. “Take nothing for granted right now. I just want to get through to the 20th at noon”—the inauguration of Joe Biden as president. Whatever happened, Milley was overseeing the mobilization of America’s national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world.

To the contrary, Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the government to prevent the constitutional certification of a legitimate election won by Joe Biden. It was indeed a coup attempt and nothing less than “treason,” he said, and Trump might still be looking for what Milley called a “Reichstag moment.”

Pelosi interjected. “But he just did something illegal, immoral and unethical and nobody stopped him. Nobody. Nobody at the White House. This escalated in the way it did because of the intent of the president. The president incited it and nobody in the White House did anything about it. Nobody in the White House did anything to stop him.” “I’m not going to disagree with you,” Milley replied.

“Well, Madam Speaker, the launching of nuclear weapons and the incitement of a riot…” “I know they’re different. Thank you very much. What I’m saying to you is that if they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do? And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?”

“Nixon did far less and the Republicans said to him, ‘You have to go.’ Not even in the same league of things. ‘You have to go.’ The Republicans are all enablers of this behavior and I just wonder does anybody have any sanity at the White House? Say don’t go there. “They put up this fraudulent—this uh—‘he says he doesn’t have anything to do with it’ video yesterday because they know they’re in trouble. This is bad, but who knows what he might do. He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time. So don’t say you don’t know what his state of mind is. He’s crazy and what he did yesterday is further evidence of his craziness. But anyway, I appreciate what you said.” “Madam Speaker,” Milley said. “I agree with you on everything.”

“Well,” she said, “I hope you can prevail in the insane snake pit of the Oval Office and the crazy family as well. You’d think there’d been an intervention by now. The Republicans have blood on their hands and everybody who enables him to do what he does has blood on their hands and the traumatic effect for our country.

“But it is a sad state of affairs for our country that we’ve been taken over by a dictator who used force against another branch of government. And he’s still sitting there. He should have been arrested. He should have been arrested on the spot. He had a coup d’état against us so he can stay in office. There should be some way to remove him. But anyway, it’s no use wasting your time on this. I appreciate that. Thank you, General. Thank you.”

Milley saw alarming parallels between Nixon and Trump. In 1974, Nixon had grown increasingly irrational and isolated, drinking heavily, and, in despair, pounding the carpet in prayer with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

“What’s different about this moment in history is that the American people are going to have to stand up and defend the country’s values and the Constitution because they don’t have a president who is going to do it.”

Ryan’s main takeaway: Do not humiliate Trump in public. Humiliating a narcissist risked real danger, a frantic lashing out if he felt threatened or criticized.

On April 26, 2017, Ryan got word that Trump was ready to announce that the United States would leave the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, the pact linking the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Ryan told Trump he risked public humiliation. “You’re going to crash the stock market,” Ryan warned. Trump pulled back.

“You’re not in the foxhole with me!” Trump screamed. Ryan yelled back. “Are you finished? May I have some time to speak now? “You’re the president of the United States. You have a moral leadership obligation to get this right and not declare there is a moral equivalency here.” “These people love me. These are my people,” Trump shot back. “I can’t backstab the people who support me.”

When Trump again complained about only getting $1.6 billion for the border wall in the omnibus, Burks said the number in the bill was the number the president had asked for in his own budget. “Who the hell approved that?” Trump asked. No one spoke. An hour in, Ryan asked, “Are you going to sign this bill or not?” “Yeah. Fine. I’ll sign it,” Trump said.

“What the hell was that?” Ryan asked. “It’s like this every day around here,” Short said. “Oh my God. Jesus,” Ryan said.

At 2:29 a.m., the Associated Press declared Trump the winner, and a shocked Hillary Clinton soon conceded. Biden immersed himself in phone calls. “My God, the world has just turned upside down,” he said.

Mattis once called Trump’s tendency to wander off during briefings “Seattle freeway off-ramps to nowhere,” where Fox News items were “more salient to him.”

Biden’s next words would stick forever with Klain: “This guy just isn’t really an American president.” Biden’s certainty surprised Klain. He had anticipated Biden’s usual exhausting back-and-forth, picking at the pluses and minuses of important decisions.

“This is going to be brutal on your family,” Klain told him. “The one thing about Trump is there will be no rules. He will throw every lie, every harsh thing, every mean thing he can at you and your family.”

When Biden was on the ticket in 2008, he and Senator John McCain, then the Republican nominee, would have off-the-record, back-channel exchanges to smooth the waters. “There’s going to be no phone calls here,” Klain said. “This is going to be a battle to the death. Nothing off-limits. Trump will use every possible tool, legitimate and illegitimate, fair and unfair, true and false to try to destroy you and your family.”

Biden’s grandson Robert “Hunter” Biden II handed him a photo taken of the two of them at his father, Beau’s, funeral. He was then nine years old, and Biden had bent down to comfort him with his hand cupping the boy’s chin. Corners of the right wing online had lit up with wild allegations about Biden’s gesture, suggesting Biden was a pedophile. The younger Biden told his grandfather he knew a campaign could be nasty.

In a suit jacket and open-collared shirt with dramatic background music, Biden said “Charlottesville, Virginia, is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history,” Thomas Jefferson. It is “also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. Who we are. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen.” Notable was what was not included. No biography. No discussion of policy. Just Charlottesville, the “soul of the nation,” and Trump as a moral aberration.

“Welcome to the race Sleepy Joe,” Trump said on Twitter. “I only hope you have the intelligence, long in doubt, to wage a successful primary campaign. It will be nasty—you will be dealing with people who truly have some very sick & demented ideas. But if you make it, I will see you at the Starting Gate!”

“I just feel like a young man. I’m so young. I can’t believe it,” Trump told them. “I’m a young vibrant man. “I look at Joe. I don’t know about him.” When Biden, appearing on ABC’s The View that day, was told of Trump’s comment, he playfully dipped his head for a second, blinked twice in exasperation, and smiled. “Look,” Biden joked, “if he looks young and vibrant compared to me, I should probably go home.”

He saw Trump as America’s Benito Mussolini in waiting. Clyburn wondered if Trump would leave the White House if he lost reelection.

“You know,” Pelosi added, “these young people now, they have a smaller attention span. So, we all have to be briefer in how we speak.”

Demonstrably untrue.

It ran on January 27. The headline: “Trump Is Worst Possible Leader to Deal with Coronavirus Outbreak.” Biden blasted Trump for tweeting “it will all work out well” and for proposing “draconian cuts” to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. He pledged, if elected, to “always uphold science, not fiction or fearmongering.”

On July 25, 2019, Trump had called recently elected Ukrainian prime minister Volodymyr Zelensky, who was seeking a commitment of military aid from the United States in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia. In the call, a transcript of which Trump later ordered released, Trump asked Zelensky to talk with Attorney General William Barr and the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, about an investigation of the Bidens, particularly Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that faced legal trouble.

And while POTUS started off in a strong position on his handling of the [coronavirus], even though he continued to dominate the conversation and drew huge audiences with his daily briefings, the controversies and conflicts that came out of them were often the only take-aways for voters. Fabrizio underscored his conclusion: As we have seen many times before, it isn’t POTUS policies that cause the biggest problem, it is voters’ reactions to his temperament and behavior.

“This election is about the suburbs,” Barr said. “You know you’re going to bring in your base and you don’t gain anything by continuing to be more and more outrageous. And I think you have some repair work to do among Republican and independent voters who like your policies generally.” Barr paused and delivered his summary line: “They just think you’re a fucking asshole.”

“Your base cares about seeing Comey and the rest of these guys held accountable, but these other people don’t. They don’t care about your fucking grievances. And it just seems that every time you’re out there, you’re talking about your goddamn grievances. They’re worried about their future. They’re worried about the economy now with Covid and stuff like that.

“The electorate is not as fluid. Last time, they didn’t know you as a public figure and they were willing to give you a chance. Now, a lot of people have made up their minds about you. They think they know who you are. So, they’re not as fluid. And the other thing that’s different, and I think the thing that’s the main problem, is you think you’re a fucking genius, politically.

“Mr. President, this is an election year. The liberals on the Supreme Court voted to hear this case because they realize this is a fucking loser for you. We’re in the middle of a Covid epidemic. And you are now creating uncertainty as to people’s medical coverage. And you haven’t put up a substitute and we’re going to lose the case. We knocked out the mandate.”

“We need to be with Texas,” Trump said. “That is my base.” “The attorney general of Texas is not the president of the United States,” Barr said. “He has his constituency. You have your constituency. I don’t see outsourcing our policy to the fucking state of Texas.”

Birthright citizenship is rooted in the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, designating that all persons born or naturalized in the United States “are citizens of the United States.” Trump wanted an executive order that would deny citizenship to people born in the United States whose parents were in the country illegally. The U.S. would then not issue citizenship documents to them.

“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.

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.

Trump had tweeted earlier that month about his view: “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 cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” 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 press briefing. “America will again and soon be open for business.”

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.” Woodward asked, was there a moment where you said to yourself, this is the leadership test of a lifetime? “No,” Trump said.

Articulate and harsh, and known for his fitted suits and skinny ties, Miller had helped draft Trump’s “American carnage” inaugural address and had been the architect of the controversial travel ban for Muslim-majority countries. He seemed to forever be lingering in the Oval Office, waiting for an opportunity to push his agenda. If there were ever a modern-day Rasputin, Joint Chiefs chairman Milley had concluded it was Miller.

“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, 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.

But Trump was adamant: 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. They were exactly the wrong troops for the job.

Trump got up and strode down to the Situation Room. 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.”

Washington, D.C., police officers used riot control devices, creating loud explosions, sparks and smoke. “Pepper balls” that irritate the eyes and nose were shot at protesters. Some officers pushed protesters to the ground. Others on horseback herded people away. 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.”

“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.”

At that moment, Barr felt like he could sink into concrete. Unlike Milley, he was a political appointee who wanted to see Trump get some good press and win. But he knew this spectacle, which he had been told earlier would be a simple “outing” by the president, was utterly ridiculous. There was no other way to describe it. 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.

“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.” Milley thought Esper should be forever thanked for drawing a bright line. It was an important moment. Their phones started to blow up. “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.”