John Bolton’s book will make little difference to President Trump’s reelection prospects. The president’s admirers, taking their lead from their champion, are already dismissing the former national security adviser as an embittered has-been, “a disgruntled boring old fool,” in the president’s own words.
If Trump’s base could turn on Jim Mattis, a Marine who led his troops with distinction in the two Iraq wars and in Afghanistan, they will have little difficulty slandering a civilian with an 1890s bartender mustache.
We take this hyperpartisanship for granted, but it is worth standing back for a moment to analyze the phenomenon. After all, you’d think that Trump’s core supporters, especially working-class men, would admire the quiet patriotism of a Mattis or a Bolton far more than the needy, gabbling self-absorption of the commander in chief.
Sure, not everyone shares Bolton’s muscular foreign policy assumptions. It is wrong to call Bolton a neocon: He likes to deploy forces where he sees clear U.S. interests, not because he believes in nation-building or spreading democracy overseas. But it is fair to say that he was unusually gung-ho about invading other places — too much so, on many occasions, for me.
That said, there can be no doubting Bolton’s expertise or his love for his country. Even his most belligerent foreign policy assumptions fall squarely within what used to be mainstream right-of-center thought. He is skeptical of Russia, China, and Iran and supportive of NATO, Taiwan, and national sovereignty. He is unequivocally pro-Brexit — indeed, he reveals in his book that he and Trump were almost alone in the administration in positively wanting to support Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union rather than vaguely approving of it. His ideology, as he describes it in his opening pages, is the very definition of conservatism:
“I followed Adam Smith on economics, Edmund Burke on society, The Federalist Papers on government, and a merger of Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles on national security. My first political campaigning was in 1964 on behalf of Barry Goldwater.”
The ensuing book is solidly and uncomplicatedly conservative. Bolton has little time for gossip or character assassination. He praises Trump on occasion and, when he expresses disagreement, he does so in a careful and measured way. His main criticisms of Trump are those that any Republican should recognize: that the president relies, Corleone-like, on a network of family cronies; that he is inconsistent; and that he is too much in awe of overseas dictators, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un.
Trump’s response to this restrained criticism? “Washed up Creepster John Bolton is a lowlife who should be in jail, money seized, for disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information.” Naturally, many Trumpsters have fallen in behind the new party line, and Fox News has turned viciously against its former contributor. But does anyone truly believe that Bolton is motivated by greed? He gave up a highly lucrative life, with several corporate positions and a lot of paid speaking gigs, to take the job, returning to service in his 70s as an old warhorse to battle. The venom aimed at Bolton and at the tiny number of conservatives who express even moderate criticism of Trump is one of the strangest and ugliest phenomena in contemporary politics.
I absolutely understand the argument that Trump is taking the battle to his foes, shaking up a squishy leftist bureaucracy. I can see the transactional case for him, the idea that preserving a free economy and a judiciary that upholds the Constitution matters more than one man’s character failings. I don’t dispute that the alternatives are unappetizing.
But Trumpsters, in general, are not interested in qualified or contingent support. They don’t want to be told that there is a case for Trump as the lesser evil. They demand total loyalty, loud enthusiasm, a readiness to shift your own views whenever the president shifts his.
Hence, I suspect, the disproportionate rage directed at the handful of politicians and commentators who, sticking to what was an almost universal conservative position before and during the 2016 primaries, keep their distance from the White House. These figures — Joe Scarborough, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, Jay Nordlinger, Mitt Romney, David French — are so few that they hardly represent a threat. If Bolton really is “a disgruntled boring old fool,” he is hardly going to swing the November election.
My hunch is that anti-Trump conservatives are the bad conscience of the wider movement, that they force others to acknowledge trade-offs that they would rather not think about. To put it another way, they are living reminders of what the Republican Party used to be until four years ago. No wonder they get so much flak.
