(CNN)Donald Trump's final days as president were defined by near-total chaos as House Democrats moved to impeach him for his action (and inaction) during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol even as the soon-to-be-former president sought to use the power of his office to settle scores and reward loyalists.
And yet, even amid those last, wild days, there was a sense that for as bad as everything we could see was, there was even worse stuff going on behind closed doors that wouldn't be made public until Trump left office, and the true reportorial digging began.
Which brings me to Tuesday, when two highly anticipated Trump books -- Michael Bender's "Frankly We Did Win This Election," and Michael Wolff's "Landslide" -- went on sale, with a third book -- " I Alone Can Fix It" by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker -- scheduled to be released in seven days' time.
All three books focus on Trump's last year in office. And all three present what can only be described as a terrifying picture of a president consumed by personal hatred and unwilling to even consider the limits his predecessors had placed on themselves in office.
The stories that have already emerged paint a scary picture. Trump calling for the execution of whoever leaked that he had been taken to the White House bunker while Black Lives Matter protesters were marching through the streets of Washington in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. His volcanic reaction when Arizona was called for Joe Biden on election night. Trump raging at then-Attorney General Bill Barr about (nonexistent) voter fraud. A shouting match between Trump and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley over the appropriate response to the BLM protests engulfing the country in the summer of 2020.
There are more stories that have emerged from these books. And there will be even more once readers -- and reporters -- get their hands on the hard copies and are able to do their own digging into Trump's final days.
But these stories also present a problem: Each one is, yes, appalling. But the nature of our news cycle is such that even as I was writing this piece, I was struggling to remember the individual stories that had already come out of the books.
The stories that come out of these books -- released to gin up excitement and, more importantly, sales in advance of their releases -- tend to be fleeting, shining bright for a brief moment when the political universe is all staring at them but quickly disappearing into the vastness of our broader news consumption.
That fact is why it's important not to get too caught up in any one revelation that has or will emerge from these books and instead take a step back and see the broader reality being painted here. And that reality is this:
* Faced with a once-in-a-century public health crisis, Donald Trump not only drastically mishandled some of the basics (rapid testing for Covid-19, mask-wearing) but also actively worked to undermine public confidence in the very doctors, epidemiologists and public health experts who were working to keep Americans safe.
* Unable to accept that he had lost the election, Trump sought to use the official powers of the government -- including the Justice Department -- to try to find non-existent evidence of fraud. He created an environment in which a large chunk of Americans believed this Big Lie about the election and then not only incited the January 6 crowd but also stood by for hours as they ransacked the Capitol.
* Trump, who repeatedly told crowds during the campaign that he had done more for Black people than any president since Abraham Lincoln, failed to grasp either the gravity or the goals of the Black Lives Matter protests. He saw the racial justice protests as nothing more than an uprising against HIM -- and tried to force the military to deploy to states where the marches were most prevalent.
This is, in sum, a man deeply unfit for the presidency. (That is not a partisan statement. It is a statement of fact based on the clear portrait we have of how Trump behaved while in the most powerful office in the country.) A man who, by his inability to understand the sanctity of the office he held, threatened to destroy that sanctity for those who would follow him into the White House. And a man who was, without any question, an active danger for every single American -- whether they supported or opposed him.
THAT needs to be the takeaway from these books. THAT is the forest through the trees. And THAT is the truth that voters needs to hear if and when Trump tries to reclaim the presidency in 2024.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump insisted Thursday that he wouldn’t have used the military to illegally seize control of the government after his election loss. But he suggested that if he had tried to carry out a coup, it wouldn’t have been with his top military adviser.
In a lengthy statement, Trump responded to revelations in a new book detailing fears from Gen. Mark Milley that the outgoing president would stage a coup during his final weeks in office. Trump said he’s “not into coups” and “never threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government.” At the same time, Trump said that “if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is” Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The mere mention of a coup was a stunning remark from a former president, especially one who left office under the cloud of a violent insurrection he helped incite at the U.S. Capitol in January in an effort to impede the peaceful transfer of power to Democrat Joe Biden. Since then, the FBI has warned of a rapidly growing threat of homegrown violent extremism.
Despite such concerns, Trump is maintaining his grip on the Republican Party. He was meeting on Thursday with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and has stepped up his public schedule, holding a series of rallies for his supporters across the country in which he continues to spread the lie that last year’s election was stolen from him.
His comment about a coup was in response to new reporting from “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year” by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The book reports that Milley was shaken by Trump’s refusal to concede in the weeks after the election.
According to early excerpts published by CNN and the Post on Wednesday ahead of its release, Milley was so concerned that Trump or his allies might try to use the military to remain in power that he and other top officials strategized about how they might block him — even hatching a plan to resign, one by one.
Milley also reportedly compared Trump’s rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during his rise to power.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley reportedly told aides. “The gospel of the Führer.”
Milley’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Milley has previously spoken out against drawing the military into election politics, especially after coming under fire for joining Trump on a walk through Lafayette Square for a photo op at a church shortly after the square had been violently cleared of protesters.
Trump, in the statement, mocked Milley’s response to that moment, saying it helped him realize that his top military adviser was “certainly not the type of person I would be talking ‘coup’ with.”
The book is one of a long list being released in the coming weeks examining the chaotic final days of the Trump administration, the Jan. 6 insurrection and the outgoing president’s refusal to accept the election’s outcome. Trump sat for hours of interviews with many of the authors, but has issued a flurry of statements in recent days disputing their reporting and criticizing former staff for participating.
There is no evidence that supports Trump’s claims that the election was somehow “stolen” from him. State election officials, Trump’s own attorney general and numerous judges, including many appointed by Trump, have rejected allegations of massive fraud. Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
Trump remains a dominant force in Republican politics, as demonstrated by McCarthy’s visit on Thursday to the former president’s summer home in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Trump and McCarthy were expected to spend their meeting discussing upcoming special elections, Republicans’ record fundraising hauls and Democrats they see as vulnerable in the 2022 midterm elections, according to a person familiar with the agenda who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting. McCarthy previously met with Trump in January at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Meanwhile, Republicans who are eyeing White House bids of their own aren’t crossing Trump, who remains popular with many GOP voters.
GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a potential 2024 presidential contender, said “no comment,” when asked if he thought Trump’s statement was appropriate for a former president. A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an Army veteran of two combat tours in Iraq, Cotton declined to comment again when asked if he wanted to criticize Trump’s remark.
“I think he has the right to say what he wants to say,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, when asked if he was comfortable with a former president even hypothetically entertaining the idea of a coup.
“You know, Donald Trump speaks for himself and he always has,” said Cruz, another potential White House candidate in 2024.
___
Associated Press writers Robert Burns and Alan Fram contributed to this report.
Fears That Trump Might Launch a Strike Prompted General to Reassure China, Book Says
In a sign of his concerns, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer also gathered commanders to remind them of the safeguards in the nuclear launch procedures.
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice called his Chinese counterpart in the final months of the Trump administration to reassure him that Donald J. Trump had no plans to attack China in an effort to remain in power and that the United States was not collapsing, according to “Peril,” a new book by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
“Things may look unsteady,” the chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, told Gen. Li Zuocheng of China on Jan. 8, two days after Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of his election loss and in the second of two such calls. “But that’s the nature of democracy, General Li. We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”
Yet despite his assurances, General Milley was so concerned about Mr. Trump that later that day he convened a meeting with top commanders to remind them that the procedures for launching a nuclear weapon called for his involvement in such a decision.
The book also reveals how Vice President Mike Pence struggled more than was publicly known over how to navigate Mr. Trump’s demands that he upend the election certification. Speaking privately to former Vice President Dan Quayle, who oversaw the certification of the 1992 election in which he was on the losing ticket, Mr. Pence appeared open to going along with Mr. Trump’s plan, pushed the false claim that Arizona’s voting results were wrong and asked whether there was any way he could delay certification.
A spokesman for Mr. Pence did not respond to a request for comment.
“Peril,” which is scheduled to be released next Tuesday, says its accounts are based on contemporaneous notes, documents and interviews with unnamed firsthand participants and witnesses. The New York Times obtained a copy of it.
Similar to other media reports and books released since Mr. Trump left office, the book details how Mr. Trump’s presidency essentially collapsed in his final months in office, particularly after his election loss and the start of his campaign to deny the results. Top aides — including General Milley, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Attorney General William P. Barr — became convinced that they needed to take drastic measures to stop him from trampling on American democracy or setting off an international conflict, and General Milley thought that Mr. Trump had declined mentally in the aftermath of the election, according to the book.
A little less than half of the book also covers the first several months of Joseph R. Biden’s administration, as the new president grappled with the pandemic, a faltering economy, Congress and the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“If the mission is to preserve the Ghani government, I would not send my own son,” Mr. Biden is quoted as telling aides in his first few months in office during the discussions about the withdrawal, referring to President Ashraf Ghani, who at the time was trying to repel the Taliban from taking over the country.
But it is the book’s details about the Trump administration that are likely to garner the most attention.
In the days leading up to the 2020 election, the book reveals, American intelligence showed that the Chinese believed that Mr. Trump planned to launch a military strike to create an international crisis that he could claim to solve as a last-ditch effort to beat Joseph R. Biden Jr.
General Milley, who had become increasingly concerned about China’s growing military power and the potential for one misread move to set off combat between the world superpowers, first called General Li around that time on a secret backchannel. He wanted to assure General Li and President Xi Jinping that the United States was not planning to attack China.
On the Jan. 8 call, General Li suggested that Chinese leaders feared that the United States government was unstable. He pressed General Milley over the course of an hour and a half about whether the military was going to take action.
Despite General Milley’s reassurances, he feared that Mr. Trump might be trying to find a moment that he could seize on to remain in power, similar to Hitler’s exploitation in 1933 of an arson fire at the German Reichstag to help institute emergency powers, the book said.
But even after the call, General Milley concluded that the situation was “grave” and General Li “remained unusually rattled,” the book reports.
Mr. Trump, General Milley had concluded, did not want a war but might order the launch of some sort of military strike that would set off a chain reaction and lead to war.
“I continually reminded him,” General Milley is quoted as saying, “depending on where and what you strike, you could find yourself at war.”
Later that day, General Milley spoke to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was growing increasingly concerned Mr. Trump would lash out and use military force.
“This is bad, but who knows what he might do?” Ms. Pelosi said. “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time. So don’t say you don’t know what his state of mind is.”
“Madam Speaker,” General Milley said, “I agree with you on everything.”
General Milley, who as the president’s top military adviser is not in the chain of command, tried to reassure Ms. Pelosi that he could stop Mr. Trump.
“The one thing I can guarantee is that as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I want you to know that — I want you to know this in your heart of hearts, I can guarantee you 110 percent that the military, use of military power, whether it’s nuclear or a strike in a foreign country of any kind, we’re not going to do anything illegal or crazy,” he said.
“Well,” Ms. Pelosi said, “what do you mean, illegal or crazy?”
“I can give you my word,” General Milley said. “The best I can do is give you my word and I’m going to prevent anything like that in the United States military.”
After speaking to Ms. Pelosi, General Milley convened a meeting in a war room at the Pentagon with the military’s top commanders, telling them that he wanted to go over the longstanding procedures for launching a nuclear weapon. The general reminded the commanders that only the president could order such a strike and that General Milley needed to be directly involved.
“If you get calls,” General Milley said, “no matter who they’re from, there’s a process here, there’s a procedure. No matter what you’re told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure. You’ve got to make sure that the right people are on the net.”
The general added: “The strict procedures are explicitly designed to avoid inadvertent mistakes or accident or nefarious, unintentional, illegal, immoral, unethical launching of the world’s most dangerous weapons.”
Then, he went around the room and asked each officer to confirm that they understood what he was saying.
Twelve days later, General Milley said, he thought he might be one of the happiest people at Mr. Biden’s inauguration because Mr. Trump had finally left office.
“We know what you went through,” Mr. Biden told General Milley shortly before the inauguration. “We know what you did.”
While much had been reported about General Milley’s views of Mr. Trump, the book’s depiction of Mr. Pence revealed for the first time the depths that the vice president went to as his fealty to Mr. Trump collided with calculations about his political future and the counsel of his aides and advisers to follow the Constitution.
In the days leading up to Jan. 6, Mr. Pence called Mr. Quayle, the only living Republican vice president forced to certify an election in which he was on the losing ticket.
Mr. Pence told him that the president was convinced that Mr. Pence could throw out the election results in order to keep himself in power.
“Mike, you have no flexibility on this,” Mr. Quayle told Mr. Pence. “None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away.”
“I know, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell Trump,” Mr. Pence said. “But he really thinks he can. And there are other guys in there saying I’ve got this power.”
Mr. Pence then echoed Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud. “Well, there’s some stuff out in Arizona,” Mr. Pence said.
“Mike, I live in Arizona,” Mr. Quayle said. “There’s nothing out here.”
Matthew Cullen contributed research.
Michael S. Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 15, 2021, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: New Book Details Fears Trump Would Start War. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe READ 1299 COMMENTS
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