'American democracy will continue to be tested': Peril author Robert Costa on Trump, the big lie and

[marmar]

‘American democracy will continue to be tested’: Peril author Robert Costa on Trump, the big lie and 2024
David Smith in Washington

Washington Post reporter calls co-authoring book on end of Trump presidency with Watergate legend Bob Woodward a ‘privilege’


(Guardian UK) It is nearly half a century since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became the world’s most famous journalistic double act, immortalized by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the film All the President’s Men.

But Woodward’s latest book, about the decline and fall of Donald Trump, is co-written with a different Washington Post colleague who was not yet born at the time of the Watergate break-in.

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Woodward and Costa – time will tell if it has the same ring – interviewed Trump for the Washington Post in March 2016. The presidential candidate’s observation that real power derives from “fear” gave Woodward the title of his first book in what would prove a Trump trilogy: Fear (2018), Rage (2020) and, with Costa, Peril (2021).

The word haunts it from the opening page, which quotes Joe Biden’s inaugural address – “We have much to do in this winter of peril” – to the last sentence of the 418th and final page: “Peril remains.”

The authors interviewed more than 200 people (though both Biden and Trump declined) on “deep background”, resulting in more than 6,000 pages of transcripts covering the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, presidential election, 6 January insurrection and nascent Biden presidency.

...(snip)...

Costa warns: “What happened in January 2021 was not a passing storm in American politics. It’s part of a new climate inside of the Republican party, a Republican party where in many states there is a demand to reject Biden’s victory, even to this day, and to elect Trump-allied people to election positions to make sure that President Trump, if he runs again, will have a smoother path to power. ...........(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/26/robert-costa-interview-peril-donald-trump