Adapted from the Twitter feed, Wednesday evening, June 17, 2020. Posted Friday morning, June 19.
“The idiot said WHAT?”: John Bolton during his tenure as Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, in the Oval Office, one of the rooms where it happened. Undated photo by Erin Schaff, courtesy of the New York Times.
At the same meeting, Xi also defended China’s construction of camps housing as many as 1 million Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang — and Trump signaled his approval. “According to our interpreter,” Bolton writes, “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.” ---Josh Dawsey, the Washington Post, June 17, 2020.
One of the maddening things about Donald Trump, among the thousand things that are maddening about him, is that he doesn't watch his mouth. He just says stuff, often just to hear himself saying stuff. It's what made him a popular guest on Howard Stern's show.
While this is a coveted quality in a trash-talking radio celebrity, it's lazy, irresponsible, dangerous, and, well, maddening in a President, not least because it's hard to tell if he's just saying stuff or if he means to follow through on it…
On top of which the talent he prizes most in himself is what he’s convinced is his prowess as a dealmaker, which he thinks gives him license to say whatever stuff he thinks will keep the suckers on the hook…
Sounds like John Bolton spent most of his time in the room where it happened going mad trying to figure out whether what Trump just said was him just saying stuff or him saying stuff he thought was going to ace the deal. And Bolton concluded that it didn't matter which because either way it meant Trump was an irresponsible.
By his own account, Bolton's another one who hired on not to steer Trump toward doing the right thing but toward the right RIGHT thing and then was stunned to find out that Trump can't do anything right…
Right practically. Right politically. Right morally. Right in any way or measure.
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Stuff I said before: Related Mannion Rerun: He just says stuff.
I probably won’t read the book. I don’t think I need to. Secondarily, there doesn’t appear to be much reading pleasure to get from it. Just going by the reviews and analyses in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New Yorker (Yep. Read them all. You probably have too.), it doesn’t seem Bolton has a snappy prose style or a particular gift for anecdote or characterization. Primarily, there are no surprises for anyone who has been following the news over the last five years.Trump is what he is and what he’s always been. The benefit and importance of the book lie in what Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters make of it and how much weight Bolton’s reputation carries with them. Already, mainly due to Trump’s incompetent and generally idiotic mishandling of the pandemic, a significant cohort are coming to the conclusion that the country can’t bear another four months of him, never mind another four years. “In the Room Where It Happened” should confirm this for them. Bolton was in the rooms where it happened and spent a lot of his time in them arguing with Trump, and Bolton is one of the very few prominent members of Trump’s top circle of advisors past and present who's intelligent, competent, patriotic, ethical (as far as I know), pragmatic, and possessed of a high degree of expertise and more than a modicum of moral courage. Those aren’t compliments by themselves. They're neutral qualities. Except for patriotic, all those adjectives describe Bill Barr as well. And none of it excuses Bolton for having put partisanship and personal ambition ahead of patriotism and principle for nearly two years---the seventeen months he served as National Security Advisor and the nine months since he left the job he spent opportunistically biding his time until his book came out. The historian Anne Applebaum, whose terrific essay “History Will Judge the Complicit” is the Atlantic’s cover story in the July issue, took Bolton to task in an excoriating Twitter thread:
...a wide variety of options were open to Bolton. He could have spoken to Robert Mueller. He could have given evidence in the House. He could have convened Republican Senators - they would have listened to him - to tell them how dangerous the president is.
Instead he stayed silent. Some combination of cowardice arrogance, belief in his own need to maintain influence and greed - he thought he could sell this book - prevented him from behaving with patriotism or honor.
All of his life he thought he was pushing America's interests around the world. But when he had the opportunity to do something truly important for America - to torpedo this disastrous presidency - he failed.
Just because I’m not going to read it is no reason for you not to. “In The Room Where It Happened” is available for pre-order at most fine bookstore websites. This one, for example.
Applebaum has a new book of her own coming out in late July: "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism". You can pre-order it now. This is one I know I’m going to read, right after I finish her “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine”, which I happen to be in the middle of and I recommend for its own sake and for its relevance. It’s also a good complement to “Doctor Zhivago”, which I’m also in the middle of. I’m in the middle of about twenty books.
Another reason I’m not going to read “In The Room Where It Happened” is that for sanity’s sake I have to save room in the dark alcove in my soul where I store my outrage for Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, his followup to "Fear”. He hasn’t decided on a title for it yet. I’m thinking “Favor”.
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