Trump’s insanity is right there in black and white
A new book by reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa confirms how frighteningly close we came to a global disaster, just days from the 2020 election.
The most frightening aspect of Peril, the new book by reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, is how close the US came to a calamitous constitutional crisis and a catastrophic national security disaster with global ramifications in Donald Trump’s final months as president.
“It was a perilous time and things could have spun out of control,” Woodward, 78, tells Inquirer in an exclusive interview via Zoom.
“We missed the peril and the instability of that period from the presidential election in November to December and January until Joe Biden was inaugurated.
“We discovered that there was a big national security crisis that people in the US, Australia and around the world didn’t know. The idea that there was a worry that Trump might do something irresponsibly – it was not just a fantasy, it was a real possibility.”
What stands out for Costa was not so much uncovering new details about the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol – an event sparked by Trump not accepting the election result and encouraging a public revolt – but rather what was going on inside the White House in the days before the attempt to subvert the democratic will of voters.
“Something that really surprised me was how close the election came from being totally ruptured,” Costa, 35, tells Inquirer.
“There was a co-ordinated effort to try to pressure the Vice- President, Mike Pence, to not certify Biden’s victory, to walk away, and this was a deep campaign behind the scenes.
“This was a real push by Trump from the top, from the presidency, to hold on to power. It was far more co-ordinated. It involved far more people than had previously been reported. So what we tried to do with our reporting is give readers a more vivid sense of what was happening.”
This book, Peril, is one of the most extraordinary ever written on US politics. It exposes a nation on the brink of not only a national security crisis that would likely have enveloped other nations, but also a domestic crisis as Trump tried to stage a coup d’etat.
Woodward and Costa, both reporters with The Washington Post, tell the story of Trump and Biden in the lead-up to the 2020 election and the tumultuous aftermath, and the first few months of Biden’s presidency as he grapples with Covid, ending a war in Afghanistan and winning support for his legislative agenda. It makes for gripping reading that is as absorbing as it is shocking.
This is a book based on deep background interviews that are not attributed – although many are almost certainly identifiable – and reference to many documents: presidential orders, phone transcripts, emails, meeting records, and diaries. Woodward and Costa are reporters; they tell the story based on the evidence and often let the reader draw their own conclusions.
On January 8, two days after the assault on the Capitol, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, called his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuocheng, on a secret back-channel line. Li asked Milley if the US was unstable and potentially collapsing. “We are 100 per cent steady,” Milley reassured Li. “Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”
The Chinese were already on high alert. Four days before the 2020 election, on October 30, US intelligence revealed the Chinese thought Trump was so desperate to win the election that he would precipitate a crisis by attacking China and present himself as the saviour. Milley called Li to reassure him this was not true. But he worried that if China feared an attack, they might strike first.
Woodward says Milley did not step outside the bounds of his office and instead used military means to de-escalate a potential disaster. “It’s the hair-trigger environment, the knife’s edge of uncertainty, miscommunication, the seeds of war – and it could have spun out of control, so it was a real crisis moment,” he says.
While Milley had reassured Li about the stability of US democracy, he privately called the January 6 riot an attempted coup which was treasonous and a “Reichstag moment” – a reference to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party’s terror and violence as it seized power in Germany in 1933.
CIA director Gina Haspel feared there was a “right-wing coup” in the making.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi was also anxious about what Trump might do in his final days. Woodward and Costa recount, word-for-word, a conversation between Pelosi and Milley. “What precautions are available,” she asked him, “to prevent an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or from accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike?” Milley reassured her, as he had Li, that this would not happen. The military chiefs would prevent it.
If the security crisis is not alarming enough, the new details about Trump’s attempt to overturn the election are chilling. While a mob hell-bent on violence and destruction was planning to invade the US Capitol, doing so in the president’s name, Trump was examining how he could torch the constitution.
Attorney-General Bill Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo enabled but also tried to restrain Trump, as did Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy who both dislike the former president but also need him given the influence he wields in their party.
Barr called conspiracy theorists Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who failed to come up with any evidence of vote fraud, “f..king nuts” and nothing more than a “clown car”. Pompeo thought they were “crazies”.
Republican senators Mike Lee and Lindsey Graham examined the election fraud claims and found they did not at all stack up, and told Trump.
“Trump is still invested, emotionally and politically, with this claim of the stolen election,” Woodward says. “We had an obligation as reporters to dig into this as much as possible – maybe some of it was true? We found out zero of it was true.”
Enter conservative lawyer John Eastman. He wrote a memo, obtained by Woodward and Costa, which outlined how Pence, rather than supervise the counting of the electoral college votes and certify the election result, could in fact overturn the election by disqualifying electors or sending the decision to the House of Representatives.
Trump advocated the Eastman memo to Pence. In a series of extraordinary scenes in the Oval Office, Trump urged Pence to authorise his coup. “Listen to John,” Trump told Pence on January 4. “Wouldn’t it almost be cool to have that power?” Trump told Pence on January 5. And finally, on January 6, Trump said: “Mike, you can do this. I’m counting on you to do this.”
Pence was, it seems, contemplating it. He consulted former vice-president Dan Quayle, who advised him to “forget it” because he had no constitutional authority to do so. He talked to his staff about his options. And he met with the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, who advised him to “stick to the script” and follow the usual procedure.
“Pence is a man who is torn,” explains Costa. “He wants to help the man who made him vice-president. For four years, he has been at Trump’s side, a loyal political soldier. His associates tell us that he wants to run in 2024. He wants to be the successor to the Trump brand of politics.
“Ultimately, he sides with the constitution and does his duty.”
The book documents Biden’s decision to run for president with the purpose of restoring America’s “soul”, his successful campaign and the 46th president’s first few months in office. Woodward and Costa are just as equally detailed in reporting the internal discussions and negotiations in the Democratic campaign, the White House and the Capitol as the Biden administration begins.
“Biden, though a moderate and a centrist for much of his career, has really aligned himself with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” Costa says.
“This is a man who at the end of his career wants to be seen as a transformational president and is willing to rethink his whole political approach.”
While Biden’s stimulus bill was a legislative triumph, his chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and his infrastructure and social spending bills have hit roadblocks in congress. Woodward and Costa write that Biden does not like living in the White House and his staff are concerned about his unscripted and gaffe-prone tendencies, and try to cocoon him behind “the wall”, as they call it.
Trump casts a shadow over the Biden presidency. Woodward, who became famous for his reporting on Watergate with Carl Bernstein, sees some comparisons between Trump and Richard Nixon but notes that Trump effectively controls the Republican Party whereas in 1974 it was the Republican leadership that edged Nixon out of office.
“Nixon was a criminal president,” Woodward says. “His secret tape recordings established conclusively that he was a criminal and the Republican Party turned against him. We now see an environment in America that is completely different. The Republican Party supports Trump.”
In his earlier books on Trump, Fear (2018) and Rage (2020), Woodward shows Trump was not only unfit for office but dangerous. Peril underscores this. But Trump is not going quietly into the night. He has millions of supporters. And he wants “revenge” for what he believes was a stolen election.
“It is not just Trump that’s a concern for US democracy, it is also the power of the presidency,” Costa says. “The presidency has been challenged in terms of its credibility, public trust, but it has also seen an enormous increase in its power. Whether it’s a pressure campaign about certification of an election or firing nuclear weapons, does the president have too much power?”
“We both feel that Trump is going to run (in 2024),” Woodward says. “So, what we wanted to do is explain this hidden side of his presidency, which is the national security crisis and some of his actions that he triggered, such as the insurrection on January 6. The bottom line? The lesson is that democracy is fragile.”
Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa is published by Simon & Schuster.
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