Thursday, July 15, 2021

Reichstag moments

      There is a spate of new books supposedly chronicling the last days, weeks, or months of tRump administration.   Most of them are in the gossipy, breathless prose of sensationalists like Michael Wolff, but two teams of Washington Post reporters have come up with possibly the definitive accounts of the Covid crisis (The Nightmare Scenario) and the coup plotting that went on before the January 6 insurrection (I Alone Can Fix It).  In particular Carol Leonig and Philip Rucker's book on the events and discussions held in the White House after tRump's election loss to Joe Biden is a scary look at the possibility of military coup to keep the 45th president in office.

     The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley is the unsung hero of Leonig's and Rucker's book.   Whether this is true or Milley is just puffing up his reputation is open to question.  However, the authors' logged hundreds of hours of interviews, including 2 hours with one of the least self aware subjects on earth, aka, the former guy.  According to Leonig and Rucker, Milley was afraid of a "Reichstag moment", referring to the actions of Hitler' s paramilitary brownshirts and their actions to put him in power.  I don't usually pay much attention to books on contemporary politics, but I look forward to reading both of the above.

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