The last thing President Trump needed during an election year on top of a raging public health catastrophe and a recession was a mouthy staffer making him look bad. But John Bolton, the brash, unapologetic uber-hawk and former national security adviser, had other ideas.
Bolton left the administration in fall 2019 after disagreeing with his boss on practically every single foreign policy issue. Trump essentially stopped listening to Bolton months prior, when the president began to wonder whether the man he picked to coordinate the national security bureaucracy was actually working on behalf of his priorities.
Any respect these two ego-driven individuals had between one another has now evaporated with the leaking of Bolton’s tell-all memoir, The Room Where It Happened, in which he paints Trump as a criminal and ignoramus who was never really qualified to be commander in chief to begin with. (Which raises the question: Why did Bolton agree to work for Trump in the first place?)
By now, you have seen some of the juicier excerpts. According to Bolton, Trump was a dumpster fire who had no clue Britain was a nuclear weapons power, intervened to try to stop a case against a Turkish bank to get on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s good side, pleaded with Chinese President Xi Jinping to help his reelection prospects, and sought to grant refugee status to white South African farmers who were supposedly being attacked for their land.
“The president isn’t worried about foreign governments reading this book,” Bolton told ABC News in his first media interview since his work was released. “He’s worried about the American people reading this book.”
From what has been published thus far, Bolton’s memoir reads like one long, gossipy “Page Six” column crafted in the self-serving, pandering prose we have come to expect from the man. The media have jumped on the national security professional’s account as a paragon of truth as if he were the 21st century’s version of John Dean putting country over party. Bolton has been provided the prime-time television spots and op-ed space he is so fond of for promoting his simpleton view of the world and his reckless prescriptions for resolving some of the most challenging international problems of our time.
The book is also a familiar compilation of how Bolton has acted after his previous government service: distancing himself from bad decisions he supposedly sought to stymie and transparently clouding the public record to make his colleagues look like dopes and himself look like the all-knowing, national security graybeard he sees himself as.
Bolton has significant credibility problems — something some of the media’s more well-known journalists are too often willing to ignore. This is the same guy who tried to persuade the public that Cuba was actively building a weaponized biological weapons program, a claim U.S. intelligence officials at the time thought was spurious and not backed up by the evidence. When an intelligence analyst responsible for biological weapons programs wrote to Bolton taking issue with his assessment, Bolton had a red-faced, childish tirade and sought to get the analyst fired. He was also a leading public face on the farce that was Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program, giving speeches ramping up an imminent threat to the United States that simply didn’t exist. “We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq,” Bolton, then a State Department nonproliferation official, told the BBC in 2002. “I think the Iraqi people would be unique in history if they didn’t welcome the overthrow of this dictatorial regime.”
As we now know, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In Bolton’s mind, though, overthrowing Saddam was still the right decision — despite all evidence to the contrary, including hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, a complete unending of the previous Middle Eastern order, the proliferation of terrorist groups in the region, the trillions of taxpayer dollars spent, and an Iraqi government that continues to be heavily beholden to next-door Iran.
Forgive me if I roll my eyes whenever Bolton open’s his mouth.
Are his allegations against Trump true? It wouldn’t surprise me if some indeed were. People have made their minds about Trump long ago. Half the country views him as a modern-day dictator. The other half sees a strong, decisive, and refreshing leader. Readers will pore over through Bolton’s book and see what they want to see.
But everyone should remember an infamous quote from then-President George W. Bush, who, after all, hired Bolton and at one point nominated him to be his permanent representative at the United Nations: “Let me just say from the outset that I don’t consider Bolton credible.”
Ditto.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
