Peril

by Bob Woodward

“There is a clear trend moving,” McConnell said, toward a place where the Republican Party is not dominated by Trump. “Sucking up to Donald Trump is not a strategy that works.”

2022 could end up being a lot like 2014, McConnell said. Republicans could hold firm and support normal, not crazy. Focus on electability, intervene in primaries when needed. McConnell was confident his preferred candidates could eventually outpace any ragtag network that Trump might try to assemble. McConnell and his crew would out-organize them, out-fundraise them, and avoid theatrical clashes.

It had to be about winning. If Trump was useful, great. If he were not useful, they would oppose his picks. Strictly business, McConnell said.

Clyburn wanted more. “Democracy is on fire and the Senate is fiddling!” he said to his aides as the Democrats struggled. “The head of the orchestra is a man named McConnell.”

In a 2015 interview, Russian president Vladimir Putin was asked if his 16 years in the KGB influenced him. Putin’s memorable answer: “Not a single stage of our life passes without a trace.”

Presidents lived in the world of the suboptimal.

As do we all.

“If we come back in 2022 and recapture the House and take back the Senate, you’ll get your fair share of credit. If we fail to take back the House and the Senate in 2022, Trumpism, I think, will die. January 6 will be your obituary. “If we don’t win in 2022, we’re screwed.”

“Mr. President, there’s a growing group of people who wonder if you’ve been too damaged to win again. And these are pretty much Trump people. You’ve got to prove to them that you can change.”

“They were peaceful people. These were great people,” he said in a July 11 interview with Fox News. “The love, the love in the air, I have never seen anything like it. “You have people with no guns that walked down. And frankly, the doors were open and the police, in many cases, you know, they have—they have hundreds of hours of tape. They ought to release the tape to see what really happened.” Yet more than 100 police officers had been injured during the riot. Graham did not want to hear this. By the summer, federal prosecutors had charged more than 500 people in the riot.

“He had an army. An army for Trump. He wants that back,” Parscale later told others. “He feels a little pressure of not being in the fight like he was and he’s wrapping his head around how to get back there. “I don’t think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance.”

Milley, ever the historian, thought of the little remembered 1905 revolution in Russia. The uprising had failed, but it had set the stage for the successful 1917 revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the 1917 revolution, had later called the 1905 revolution “The Great Dress Rehearsal.” Had January 6 been a dress rehearsal?

“Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear,” Trump told us.