Donald Trump will not forgive those such as Mike Pence and Bill Barr who refused to declare an election fraud.Credit:Jose Luis Magana
Trump “cared more about himself than the country”,always putting “his political and personal interests over the common good”. They give us this wrenching insight:Trump’s “self-victimisation yoked him to his supporters”,who also felt “disrespected by elites and wronged” by the global economy. That’s who showed up at the Capitol riot on January 6.
Last year was not just a presidential election year,but an election in a once-in-a-century pandemic. Even though the early internal polling showed the Trump base as energised as ever and poised to deliver a win even bigger than in 2016,Trump was warned repeatedly,by his aides and by allies such as Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu,that his catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic “could cost us the election”. But Trump persisted with dangerous stunts such as touting the virtues of bleach to fight COVID-19 and politicising the wearing of masks. The virus would ultimately invade him.
Trump relished hating his enemies and vanquishing their attempts to take him down:beating the rap in the “Russia hoax” probe by Special Counsel Bob Mueller and his impeachment for corrupting his office. “I should be impeached more often,” he said in 2020. He got his wish in 2021.
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Power in this White House was held by a very small group:Trump;son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner;chief of staff Mark Meadows and Attorney-General Bill Barr. They formed a wall around Trump that enabled him to act out all his impulses and prejudices,never checking his lurid excesses.
The existential question posed by Trump was always:would he threaten America’s democracy and the Republic? A preview of the nightmare that could occur unfolded after the murder of George Floyd,with protests erupting across the country,and the movement for racial justice and Black Lives Matter engulfing Lafayette Square,directly across from the White House. On June 1,police and military forces cleared the square of protesters. Trump marched with his staff,the Attorney-General and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,Mark Milley (in combat fatigues),to St John’s church,where Trump held a Bible aloft.
That seminal moment of the use of military force to secure Trump’s power as president was an epiphany for General Milley. And he is the hero of this book. Seared and chastened,he was never again going to permit the use of the military to interfere in the political process. He was not going to permit the military to overturn an election. He was not going to stand by and let the Trump forces of insurrection have their “Reichstag moment”,bathed in “the gospel of the Fuhrer”.