New Trump book seems to misunderstand his central motivation.

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“Smart, rational people break when it comes to Trump,” Lindsey Graham told Bob Woodward and Washington Post reporter Robert Costa for their new book, Peril. “He’ll get you to do things that are not good for you because you don’t like him.” Graham, whose every attempt to separate himself from Trump has been followed by some groveling, compensatory abasement, ought to know. As Woodward and Costa portray it, Graham’s only notable value to his party at present is as a “Trump whisperer,” tasked with assessing the former president’s state of mind (it doesn’t change much) and persuading him to let go of his incessant claims of having been cheated of victory in the 2020 election, an enterprise that is apparently doomed.

But just this once, I’ll have to agree with Graham. My own unabated appetite for tales of Trump’s downfall—his weeks in the figurative bunker, surrounded by toadies and cranks, spinning off into ever-more-loony theories of election fraud, as the West Wing empties and Rudy Giuliani, his hair dye dripping down his face, pours poison into his ears—demonstrates Graham’s point. Peril is a more virtuous bowl of schadenfreude than Michael Wolff’s racier Landslide, published earlier this year. Call it corn flakes to Wolff’s Cap’n Crunch. In either case, it’s not good for me, but it’s so hard to pass up.

[Read: God Help Me, I Savored Every Word of Michael Wolff’s Trashy Book on Trump’s Final Year]

For Wolff, the period between the election and Joe Biden’s inauguration was a spectacular shitshow, and little more than that. Landslide is a webcam inside a clown car. Trump’s incompetence as a leader made it nearly impossible—at the end, when he had driven away any staffer of independent ability—to get much done in the way of governance, good or bad. As Woodward and Costa portray it, the final two months or so of Trump’s presidency were a period of veiled crisis in which the handful of sane people left in the cabinet feared he might do something terrible.

The hero of this part of Peril’s narrative is Gen. Mark Milley, whose strenuous efforts to run interference between Trump’s moods and U.S. foreign policy, as reported by the authors, have been making headlines for the past couple of days. Books like this are shaped by their sources, and those sources always have their own agendas. Former Attorney General William Barr, for example, is apparently granting long interviews to everyone writing a book-length account of Trump’s final year in office in an…