Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Peril remains. That is the overarching theme of this narrative of Joe Biden’s decision to run, the two presidential campaigns and then the pandemic which turned those campaigns upside down, the election and then Trump’s gradual descent into the narrative he continues to this day: that he won and the election was stolen from him. (His rage began with Fox News announcing that Biden won Arizona. That seemed to be the main trigger — and then traveled elsewhere, like Georgia.) Most alarmingly, it came down to a very detailed plan written by Eastman to throw out the votes of millions of people in blue states and let the house decide the election which, because the house is limited to 1 vote per state, would have gone to Trump. That plan, and any version of it that they could come up with, relied on Mike Pence seizing power he did not have. But the book goes beyond Trump finally leaving the white house to show how people like Lindsey Graham and many other Trump sycophants are still working at disassembling democracy in order to have Republicans control of all branches of the government. The title “Peril” is present tense. I found it easy to read and was never confused, and I was glad that it did not go into the many “outrageous” things that Trump did, or only mentioned a few of them. And it gives a pretty good overview of how Trump made a deal with the Taliban without including the Afghanistan government, and then drew our troops down from 86,000 to 3,000, basically handing over Afghanistan to the Taliban and leaving Biden to take the blame for whatever happened. General Milley also turns out to be one of the good guys.
View all my reviews