It will be left to psychologists, not historians, to write the definitive account of why Giuliani remained so steadfast to the president, but in “Peril” he’s portrayed as the prime force behind Trump’s refusal to let the election go. He was, Woodward and Costa write, “overseeing the mobilization of America’s national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world.”

Milley went over the process for nuclear strikes and other acts of war with his colleagues, to make sure nothing was instigated without his awareness. The Chinese were concerned that Trump might lash out on a global scale in a desperate attempt to secure his power. “Everything’s fine,” he told them, “but democracy can be sloppy sometimes.” Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had secret conversations with his Chinese counterparts to assure them that the United States was “100 percent steady,” despite what they might be seeing and hearing. Its opening pages recount how last October and again in January, after the riot, Gen. 6, and its primary concern is how President Trump behaved in the lead-up to and the aftermath of that crisis.īooks in this genre like to make news, and this one doesn’t waste any time. But while it covers the 2020 campaign season and the course of the pandemic and the protests after George Floyd’s murder and the opening months of Joseph Biden’s presidency, the book’s centerpiece is the riot at the Capitol on Jan. Broken up into 72 short chapters, it hurtles through the past two years of dizzying news. The frantic pace is redoubled in “Peril,” written with Robert Costa, Woodward’s colleague at The Washington Post. The books, about the staccato stream of events that accompanied Donald Trump’s time in office, are written at a mostly staccato clip. The titles of Bob Woodward’s three books about the Trump administration - “Fear,” “Rage” and now “Peril” - are appropriately blunt.

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