New book ‘Peril’: Even before Jan. 6, ‘the risk became real’ thanks to Josh Hawley

The new book “Peril,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, is quite a document. In it, virtually every prominent Republican with a pulse tells the authors about the time he or she bravely stood up to Donald Trump. And more than a few describe trying to talk him out of even attempting to overturn the free and fair election he’d almost won, but did not win.

Maybe these elected officials and Trump appointees assume — correctly, I suspect — that since few GOP voters will ever read this book, or take anything they hear about it even semi-seriously, they can speak in its pages as if among friends at The Monocle, or Ocean Prime.

Since 59% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents recently told pollsters for CNN that “believing that Donald Trump won the 2020 election” was very or somewhat important to their sense of themselves as Republicans, it seems like a safe bet that they will not want to read that so many leaders in their party know better, and did all along.

Just hours after losing, even Trump apparently knew that he had come up short: “How the hell did we lose the vote to Joe Biden?” he asked Kellyanne Conway.

But then, Steve Bannon convinced Trump to “bury Biden on Jan. 6th, fucking bury him. … We are going to kill it in the crib. Kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”

(Though f-bombs from pols, or for that matter reporters, are nothing new, there are so many in this book that you may start to wonder whether the then-president and his men know a lot of other words.)

By Nov. 10, CIA Director Gina Haspel was saying, “We are on the way to a right wing coup. The whole thing is insanity. He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum.”

Pompeo worried about ‘Giuliani’s traveling circus act’

“It’s all bullshit,” Attorney General William Barr told the president on Nov. 16. “The allegations” that the election had been stolen, he said, “were not panning out.” After Barr made that conclusion public on Dec. 1, Trump raged, “You must have said that because you hate Trump. You must really hate Trump.”

By then, Rudy Giuliani had convinced Trump that he was just the lawyer who could win a second term for him in court — for $20,000 a day, that is. No one else wanted the job, so it was his, with payment due only if he won.

Even Trump’s favorite cabinet secretary, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, worked with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to try to keep Trump from blowing the world up during 45’s final days in office. “The crazies are taking over,” Pompeo said at one of their meetings. According to “Peril,” Pompeo was at that point, “increasingly worried as he watched Trump meet with Giuliani’s traveling circus act.”

Vice President Mike Pence, alas, had to be convinced not to end our democratic experiment, but he did come through in the end. The pressure Trump put on Pence to unilaterally and unconstitutionally hand the White House back to him will remind some female readers of the boyfriend who wouldn’t take “Bye, now” for an answer: “I made you. You were nothing,” until I came along, Trump told Pence. And no, the president said, they could not still be friends.

But you know who never caved to reality, or ever tried to protect the republic instead of his Republican self? Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, that’s who.

Yes, we knew that, but “Peril” reminds any who might have forgotten that in putting his ambition ahead of all else, Hawley was a standout both before and during the attempted coup.

“The risk became real,” the book says, “when Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Yale-law educated freshman and former Supreme Court law clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, announced on Dec. 30 that he would object to the Electoral College certification on Jan. 6, becoming the first senator to do so.”

In the traumatic hours after the attack on the Capitol, Hawley stood off to himself on the Senate floor, as The Star reported at the time. “No one spoke to Hawley,” as the book puts it, “who many of them blamed for instigating the riot by announcing his opposition to the certification a week earlier.”

Eventually, Sens. Ted Cruz and Roy Blunt asked him what he was going to do, and “even with the carnage and push from some colleagues to stand down, Hawley decided he would keep his objection to both Arizona and Pennsylvania. He would remain in lockstep with Trump. When told of his decision, many of his Republican colleagues groaned. … Other Republicans would surely stick with Hawley, fearful of being seen as out of step with Trump’s voters.”

Hawley played a big role in the Big Lie. And since so many Missourians love him for it, he may be the rare national Republican who hopes his constituents will read this book, and see just how willing he was to distinguish himself.

This story was originally published September 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "New book ‘Peril’: Even before Jan. 6, ‘the risk became real’ thanks to Josh Hawley."