“The transition from Donald J. Trump to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stands as one of the most dangerous periods in American history.”1 This is how Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book, Peril, opens, chronicling the final year of the Trump administration and the first year of the Biden administration.
The book is full of eye-popping quotes by leading figures from both the Trump and Biden camps, plus Pentagon officials. Readers will be stunned to learn the true extent of the rampant chaos behind the scenes in the aftermath of Trump’s election loss. That chaos only grew in the wake of the 6 January 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who believed, despite no credible supporting evidence, that the election had been stolen.
Right out the gate, the reader is confronted with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) Gen. Mark Milley placing an urgent call to his counterpart in China to allay fears the United States was about to attack Beijing. Milley’s rattled counterpart spewed question after question. “Was the American superpower unstable? Collapsing? What was going on?” Was the U.S. military going to attack China? To Gen. Li Zuocheng, Milley insisted, “Things may look unsteady, but that’s the nature of democracy. We are 100 percent steady. Everything is fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”2
