What The Trump Books Tell Us About Jan. 6

Last Tuesday, Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate that he had sat for interviews for the recent books by Bob Woodward, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, and Michael C. Bender about the final days of the Trump administration. Asked if the books depicted what happened accurately, Milley responded, “I didn’t read any of the books.”

Over a recent six-day period, however, I read all three, along with Michael Wolff’s Landslide, a total of 1,632 pages, in a somewhat mind-bending exercise of reading accounts of the same events in close proximity, to find out where they link up and where they don’t, who is present in these stories and who is absent, and to try to make further sense of the surreal period between when Donald Trump lost the election and when a mob tried to ransack the Capitol.