For all the mythologizing and palace intrigue surrounding the recently rogue John Bolton, Sunday night’s interview elucidated what long seemed likely: The lifelong conservative Republican wants to accelerate President Trump’s ouster from the party’s leadership and orchestrate its rebuilding.
Bolton, the former national security adviser, gambles on ticking off everyone across the political spectrum specifically because he believes he’ll win the ideological war within the Republican Party. If Bolton were simply another aggrieved former staffer, he would have testified in the impeachment trial against Trump. But as he has explained, he refused to comply with an overtly partisan weaponization of the impeachment process, proving that he’s no mere binary thinker. But would he write such a bombshell book if he really believed it would cost him board positions and media gigs in the conservative world? After all, he’s still a sprightly 71 years old, younger than both Trump and his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
And what about Joe Biden? An entire cottage industry of ex-Republicans bending the knee to Biden has emerged, with professionally useless folks like “conservative” Rick Wilson conning donors out of thousands of dollars in donations to fund not just Trump’s demise but also the Democratic control of the Senate. Biden is enough of a hawk that Bolton could find some personal interest in joining Wilson and George Conway, et al., yet he’s refused to. And why?
Bolton knows that Biden will likely become a puppet president, a bipartisanly beloved leader presiding over a radical Cabinet featuring the dregs of the Obama administration and ex-Bernie Bros. If Bolton wanted to join the Lincoln Project brigade, he would have tried to tank the entire Republican Party in his book. Instead, he cleanly aims his fire at Trump, not for his ideology but precisely for his lack of one, and at grifters tied to Team Trump and Team Trump alone.
After all, he has lavished praise on Mike Pence, a Republican stalwart while Trump was still palling around with the Clintons, yet excoriated Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. He went so far as to insinuate that Jared and Ivanka would throw the Supreme Court seat of a Democratic appointee, such as that now held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to a nonoriginalist justice.
So he would rather not taint what remains of his legacy but would expedite the inevitable decline of Trump, let Biden falter on his own, and be ready to reshape the Republican Party.
It’s narcissistically transactional, the exact same vice for which he excoriates Trump. But Bolton is playing the long game, and given his track record, he might not be too far off-base.
