I’m reading “Peril,” the new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa about the nerve-racking time of Donald Trump’s last great temper tantrum in the White House.
It’s two days after the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Gen. Mark Milley talk on the telephone. They’re two rattled people trying to hold back the darkness of potential war.
In this moment, Pelosi is more than the nation’s third-highest government leader, and Milley is more than America’s top military officer and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Behind the scenes, they’re America’s parental figures.
They’re the voices of sanity, trying to figure out how to keep their unruly spoiled child from blundering the country into some sort of last-minute conflict in order to salvage the remains of his power.
Milley’s already phoned with Gen. Li Zuocheng, China’s top military leader, who’s “stunned and disoriented” by the Capitol riot and wondering if Trump is about to start international trouble.
It takes Milley an hour-and-a-half to calm Li. It takes longer for Milley and Pelosi to calm each other.
The account of their conversation is preceded by one of the most important paragraphs in the entire 400-plus pages in the book.
“What follows,” it says, “is a transcript of the call obtained by the authors.”
In other words, this dialogue is no reconstruction, and it’s not some general paraphrasing of Pelosi and Milley’s conversation. It’s verbatim. And this adds to its stunning effect.
Pelosi worries about Trump ordering “a nuclear strike.” She calls Trump “unhinged.” She tells Milley, “We must do everything that we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country and our democracy.”
Milley assures her, “We’re not going to do anything illegal, immoral or unethical with the use of force.”
“But he just did something illegal, immoral and unethical and nobody stopped him,” Pelosi replies. “Nobody. Nobody at the White House … You’re saying you’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen? It already did happen. An assault on our democracy happened and nobody in the White House did anything about it. Nobody in the White House did anything to stop him.”
“I’m not going to disagree with you,” Milley replies.
Moments later, Pelosi says, “The Republicans are all enablers of this behavior and I just wonder does anybody have any sanity at the White House … Who knows what he might do. He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time … He’s crazy and what he did [on Jan. 6] is further evidence of his craziness.”
“Madam Speaker,” Milley replies, “I agree with you on everything.”
What’s remarkable is not just this blunt, behind-the-scenes assessment of a sitting president, but the speed in which we’re learning it. At this moment, our top leaders worried about the possibility of nuclear war, the closest we flirted with it since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
But it took years to learn such details of that awful hour, and years to learn some of the secret maneuvering between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.
But there’s one more note on the passage of time — between Jan. 6 and now.
In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, we had such Republican leaders as Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy all decrying the insurrection and Trump’s role in it.
But since then, one by one, they’ve all gone back to minimizing the riot, and to licking Trump’s boots — and propping him up for another run at ruining the country in 2024, no matter the craziness seen by those who see him close up.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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