Peril

by Bob Woodward

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.

Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy,

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.”

The Republicans are all enablers of this behavior and I just wonder does anybody have any sanity at the White House?

He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time.

“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.

The president alone can order the use of nuclear weapons. But he doesn’t make the decision alone. One person can order it, several people have to launch it.

As a practical matter, if a president was determined to use them, it is unlikely a team of lawyers or military officers would be able to stop him.

The move was a reference to an edict by former secretary of defense James Schlesinger to military leaders in August 1974 not to follow orders that came directly from President Nixon, who was facing impeachment, or the White House without first checking with Schlesinger and his JCS chairman, General George Brown.

Milley was not going to allow an unstable commander in chief, who he believed had engaged in a treasonous violation of his oath, to use the military improperly.

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.”

“Trump is breathing life into kind of the darkest, worst impulses in the country.”

“They didn’t even bother to cover their faces!” Biden exclaimed. “The reasons they felt they could do it there was because they believed they had the president of the United States in their corner.”

Trump was systemically attacking the courts, the press, and Congress—a vintage move by an autocrat to dismantle institutions constricting his power.

Then a wealthy New York doctor and Republican donor called Ryan and said, “You need to understand what narcissistic personality disorder is.”

McConnell, 76 and known for being guarded and calculating, also found Trump bizarre, resistant to logic and advice.

“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.”

Hahn realized the president had no idea how the FDA operated and had made no effort to find out before sending the tweet. It was a classic tweet-burst, ignorant and disruptive. Trump did not understand the power of his words. Public faith in safety procedures was critical to convincing people to get vaccinated.

“What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road.”

My fellow Americans, our movement is far from over. In fact, our fight has only just begun.”

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

“Do you know why [Rex] Tillerson was able to say he didn’t call the president a ‘moron’?” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would dryly ask his Republican colleagues in his Kentucky drawl about the former Trump secretary of state. “Because he called him a ‘fucking moron.’ ”

“I think that he likes this,” General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confided in a phone call with a House member as a mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “He wants his supporters to be fighting to the bitter end.”

Graham was now like an addiction counselor to Trump, trying to keep his patient from taking one more drink of an imagined 2020 reelection victory.