Thread by @SethAbramson

If you've read Bob Woodward's PERIL—an appetizer for understanding January 6—and now want the 5-course meal version, there are 100 articles at PROOF that will take you inside the insurrection in a way no other source does. It's $5 to access the whole site. Sethabramson.substack.com

1/ I think what many people will find confusing about Woodward’s PERIL is that so much lacks context even as other content is over-prescribed because its source is a Trumpworld malfeasor trying to clear their name. The best example of this is actually the beginning of the book.

2/ If I didn't know what I know and hadn't published what I'd published at PROOF, I'd be wholly mystified by why so many people feared that Donald Trump would launch a military strike after January 6—and why the fear was particularly great in Russia, Iran, and especially China.

3/ Because media never explained to Americans what the "Kraken" was—and Woodward launches into his narrative without doing so—readers don't realize Trump and much of his political and legal team were putting out the false story that Russia, Iran and China stole the 2020 election.

4/ Essentially, Trump's unhinged response to losing the November 2020 election was to work with his inner circle to develop two concurrent conspiracy theories: one domestic and one international. The problem was that the domestic conspiracy theory couldn't fully explain his loss.

5/ Not only was the domestic conspiracy theory Trump and his inner circle devised insufficient to explain his 2020 election loss, it also was insufficient to justify an insurrection—because it was legalistic, mundane, and based upon esoteric disputes with legislatures and judges.

6/ So the focus of Trump's inner circle became an international conspiracy theory that we now know that circle realized was preposterous within days of the 2020 election. But key officials in Russia, Iran and China had become understandably unnerved by what Trumpworld was saying.

7/ But it wasn't just what they were saying, it was also what they were *doing*. Specifically, they were showing how serious they were about their international conspiracy theory by meeting with dangerous foreign nationals whose agenda was clear to foreign intelligence agencies.

8/ Trump advisor Michael Lindell was meeting with a Chinese dissident the Chinese government would have perceived as an enemy. The leader of the Stop to Steal movement founded by Trump advisor Roger Stone was giving interviews to Falun Gong, which China also considers an enemy.

9/ Throughout it all, Trump was pushing the theory that SARS-CoV-19 was a Chinese bioweapon and that the pandemic was the fault of the Chinese government. Meanwhile, his top allies in the media were pushing this same narrative—and he was giving them privileged access to his team.

10/ By the time of the 2020 presidential election, the core narrative of the America First movement had become the idea that communism was a clear and present danger to the United States and, more specifically, that the Biden family was financially in bed with Chinese communists.

11/ From the perspective of Chinese intelligence, Trump's actions throughout the general election campaign and after his election defeat would have reasonably appeared to be a coordinated campaign to convince Americans that China had become a clear and present danger to America.

12/ So when Trump's lawyers announced that China had declared cyberwar on the US and stolen the election in order to install a puppet regime run by a China-compromised man representing a political party marching toward communism, it took us to the brink of military confrontation.

13/ It's the context of this info that I've been writing bestselling books about and a top-ranked substack about that Woodward went on Stephen Colbert's show last night and said that he was absolutely *shocked* to discover that there was an international dimension to any of this.

14/ Yet we could forgive even Woodward's tardiness in reporting on all this if his realization had made it into his book in a fullthroated way. Instead, the reader of PERIL is immediately confronted by General Milley taking actions that—out of context—may have seemed unwarranted.

15/ The reason for this comes back to something I've often said about Woodward at this stage in his career: that his commitment to writing "nonfiction novels" rather than *histories* betrays his subject matter. He has to start his book with an alluring scene that will sell units.

16/ It is *profoundly* irresponsible to describe Pelosi and General Milley engaged in actions any journalist would know Republicans would consider a "coup attempt" without first giving the background that explains why the Pentagon and Chinese intelligence feared an imminent war.

17/ But Woodward doesn't have respect for/faith in his readership. He believes if he begins a book with context—rather than scene-setting/dialogue—no one will buy it. He won't make a lot of money and his publisher will be disappointed. The other option? Putting the country first.

18/ As I described in great detail in my 2020 book Proof of Corruption, one of the many reasons Trump lit upon China as a convenient bogeyman is that his own family's ties with China are *so* dangerous and controversial that he feared they could hurt him in the general election.

19/ But it goes beyond this. As Proof of Corruption detailed, Trump sought a collusive agreement with Beijing to help him win reelection by spreading disinformation on the Bidens. When Beijing announced that it would play no such role, Trump was enraged, and wanted vengeance.

20/ Building off the racist sentiments he'd been stoking in US voters for years; the necessity of blaming China for his own pandemic failures; his anger at Beijing's refusal to collude; and far-right anti-communist rhetoric, Team Team crafted a myth of China stealing an election.

21/ Every American should understand that it was *this* sequence of events that brought us to the brink of a real danger of a military confrontation with China—a confrontation whose final outcome would frankly be uncertain, given China's vast military and its high-tech firepower.

22/ It was *atop* this stunning history that the tragedy of January 6th occurred. That event underscored Trump's level of desperation and his historic lack of scruples. But it was also, finally, a failure of his domestic conspiracy theory.

He still had an international one left.

23/ Both officials at the Pentagon and officials in Beijing perceived that Donald Trump was in a manic and unstable state and had only one weapon left in his desperate bid to stay in office—seek the equivalent of a January 6-level transformative event on an *international* stage.

24/ But even all this is only the beginning of the story. Those who read the harrowing, fully sourced Trump-Iran chapter in Proof of Corruption will understand that in January 2020 Trump brought America to the brink of a war with Iran over false pretenses that he knew were false.

25/ Any intelligence agency—whether in Russia, Iran, China or the U.S.—would have seen Trump bringing America to the brink of a ruinous war for purely political purposes in January 2020 as a possible prelude to him doing the same thing again to hold on to power just a year later.

26/ This is why I say—as a longtime book reviewer and an English PhD and a professor of literature and an author and an editor at many publications—that Woodward's books are decidedly bad. They're *objectively* bad. They do none of the work a nonfiction book is supposed to do.

27/ They're intended to entertain rather than inform. They set scenes rather than set context. Their rhetorical schema are those of fiction rather than nonfiction—as I know from having taught both genres at the college level and also having a terminal degree in creative writing.

28/ And yet I wouldn't care about any of this, because many bad books are published across the world annually, if Bob Woodward weren't writing about the most important subjects in American history and if the popularity of his books didn't make them relevant to America's survival.

29/ American media celebrates these bad books and elevates their author, even as all of us can see that the *very ways in which these books are bad* provide ammunition to domestic extremists to falsely accuse General Milley of betraying his duty without justification or excuse.

30/ In less than a week, Milley will go before Congress. And Republicans will use Woodward's book to convince Americans that there was a coup attempt not *by* Trump but *against* Trump that was coordinated by the Democratic Party and the "deep state."

And all of it will be lies.

31/ I'm a Trump biographer who wrote more bestselling books about Donald Trump while he was the sitting president than any author in the United States. But I'm nevertheless not in a position to issue critiques against Woodward that will *stick* because I am 1/100th as well known.

32/ But I'm speaking up anyway because I don't think the devastating cultural/political effects of Woodward's profoundly bad books are justified by Woodward's need to make millions of dollars on a book for the 15th or 20th time in a row.

This is too serious to screw around with.

33/ It would've been dereliction of duty for Milley not to apprehend the serious possibility that at some point between January 7 and January 20 Trump planned to plunge this country into a war with China. All of the information the Pentagon had confirmed this was a profound risk.

34/ By the same token, Chinese intelligence would've had to be inexplicably incompetent and blind not to be on the highest possible alert after January 6—and to forcefully apprehend the possibility it might on an imminent basis become the victim of unilateral American aggression.

35/ General Milley is a hero. The context of his actions *confirms* he is a hero. But because Woodward and his publisher want PERIL to be purchased by readers of all political persuasions, he excises from his story all the context within which Milley's actions must be understood.

36/ And by excising this context, Woodward lets Trump off the hook for being the most despicable traitor in US history since the Confederate generals Trump so idolizes. Reading the beginning of PERIL, one would have no *idea* why everyone was so suspicious of Trump's intentions.

37/ Taken in sum, Woodward's Trump books act as an apologia for Trump because they give voice to sinister Trumpworld figures seeking only to rehabilitate themselves through false accounts—and position Trump as an unstable but not conniving political actor. A fool, not a villain.

38/ I well know that future U.S. historians will look to Woodward's books rather than *accurate* ones to determine how and why America came to the pass it is at now. And as an academic and an author, that makes me sick to my stomach. And as a journalist, I find it unconscionable.

39/ Read PERIL or don't—that doesn't matter to me. Everyone deserves a good "beach read" or gossip rag during a stressful time. But I hope that people will *also* read accurate, historical, fully contextualized, non-anonymously sourced accounts of this period in American history.

40/ Other than that, I have no opinion on Bob Woodward or his new book. /end

PHOTO/ Good dogs with bad book.

UPDATE/ On MSNBC, Woodward is now telling viewers that Milley told Beijing it was "preposterous" for Chinese intelligence to think Trump might attack them. The whole point is that Milley *didn't* say this because it *wasn't* preposterous—and both the Pentagon and Beijing knew it.

UPDATE2/ For Woodward to casually indicate that the position of the Pentagon was that Beijing was being ridiculous—when his book doesn't say that, and that isn't at all what happened—underscores that he seems unaware of the profound implications of the subject he is working with.

UPDATE3/ The problem here is that if the view of the Pentagon in January was that Beijing was being paranoid—*which it wasn't*—it makes Milley's level of alarm reactionary and irresponsible. Woodward just can't bring himself to say that the threat Trump posed was *substantiated*.

UPDATE4/ There's a context for this. Woodward just spent 5+ years watching those of us who *substantiated* the threat posed by Trump treated as pariahs and dismissed. To preserve his own gravitas and to make money, he in cowardly fashion pulls back from what he knows to be true.

UPDATE5/ Last night, Colbert tried to get Woodward to acknowledge that Trump was and is an unprecedented threat. Woodward wouldn't do it. And he wouldn't do it because he's seen what happens to those journalists who report this situation accurately—they're treated as a *problem*.

UPDATE6/ To be clear, I don't blame Bob Woodward's co-author Robert Costa for this. Costa is in the same position that Carl Bernstein was in many decades ago: working with a journalist who has a better nose for his own career than he has an ear for how to frame a story properly.

UPDATE7/ And yes, I'm *explicitly* writing a thread like this to try to push journalists like Woodward to do their jobs and have the courage to face the blowback from a corporate media that is terrified of losing its last remaining conservative viewers. Media culture must change.