Peril

by Bob Woodward

Clyburn was alarmed. Was he being targeted? Was this an inside job? His private office was all but unmarked. Why hadn’t the rioters gone to his public office that had his name plate on the door? How do they know this location?

As rioters stormed throughout the Capitol, many of them were checking their phones, and keeping tabs on Trump. The crowds inside were swelling. More windows were broken. Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m. He slammed Pence for not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

“You should move to Idaho,” suggested one woman. “I just don’t think they have decent seafood in Idaho,” the young man replied. Smith thought that this young man wanted a fascist takeover of the United States, but at the end of the day, if he couldn’t get decent sushi, it just might not be worth it.

One member of Congress said he was worried that Trump was going to steal Air Force One in his last days, fly it to Moscow and sell U.S. secrets to Putin.

On January 9, one day after his fraught calls with General Li of China and Speaker Pelosi, Chairman Milley jotted some thoughts in his daily notebook. It came almost like a brainstorm. On the January 6 riot, he wrote, “What is this amorphous thing that just happened on the 6th? Who are these people?” He jotted rapidly: “6MWE” “Extreme Tea Party” “QAnon,” he added, taking note of the fully discredited conspiracy theory. “Patriot Movement,” a far-right militia. “We the People Movement” “Nazis” “Proud Boys” “The Oath Keepers” “Newsmax,” the conservative news website, which had been friendly toward Trump for a long time. “Epoch,” referring to the The Epoch Times, a far-right publication that was critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Milley summarized and scribbled. “Big Threat: domestic terrorism.” Some were the new Brown Shirts, a U.S. version, Milley concluded, of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party that supported Hitler. It was a planned revolution. Steve Bannon’s vision coming to life. Bring it all down, blow it up, burn it, and emerge with power.

Someone asked, “If a guy shows up with horns, a painted face, wearing bear skin and tries to take your weapons, what do our soldiers do?” “We’ve trained for that,” a one-star general replied.

“I can throw a punch,” Graham said after Trump left, “and I stand up for him. But I’m always the guy pushing him to take the less confrontational approach. “For 2024, if he wants to run, then he’s going to have to deal with his personality problems. The problems created with Trump’s personality are easier to fix than if the party blew completely up and we had a civil war. A third-party movement would start if you tried to kick Trump out of the Republican Party. “We are in a pretty good spot on policy. But we’ve got a very damaged team captain.”

“The 6th was pretty dramatic. That’s about as dramatic as you’re going to see it, short of a civil war.” The conventional wisdom, which had settled into Washington, was that there had been warnings. But Milley knew the internet chatter had lacked coherence and did not provide the specific, credible intelligence that could avert a catastrophe. It had been a grave U.S. intelligence failure, comparable to the missed warnings prior to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and to Pearl Harbor, and exposed glaring gaps and weaknesses in the American system.

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? Milley told senior staff, “What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road.”