John Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened, chronicles his time as Trump’s national security advisor. Not pretty.
Bolton had wide-ranging foreign policy experience, and strong “hardline” views. Wearing no rose-colored glasses. The book conveys a tough-minded insistence on whatever works to promote American interests — and our values and ideals. So closely intertwined.
The book is tedious — I had to force myself to read it — but educative. Bolton describes, in exhaustive detail, the foreign policy decisions and initiatives he was involved with. One thing I’ve learned in life is that everything is more complicated than you think. Most of us have scant feel for how much work and process goes into these things. At least normally. Bolton strove to make that so, in Trump’s administration, but was frustrated at every turn.
This is really an extraordinary book. You’d expect a president’s top advisor engaging in hagiography. Instead Bolton makes clear what a fuck-up this administration was. His main burden there was damage control.
MAGA cultists cherish the myth that Trump was — somehow or other — a “good president.” They might wince at his peccadillos and baggage, but say that’s not what matters, it’s what he actually achieved, his policies. They should read this book.
Even supposing the aims of policy, in broad scope, might be right, the problem is that when an asshole is in charge, that policy is going to get fucked up.
Take Venezuela. Now here I thought the Trump administration did have the right idea, to oust the vile Maduro dictatorship. Whereas the Obama stance toward Venezuela was (like so much else) namby-pamby. Bolton details how hard he struggled, against Trump-suborned chaos within the administration, to achieve Maduro’s fall. It’s painful reading. Bolton’s final assessment is that we came closer than most people realize. But because Trump could never really get his own act together, we funked it at the critical juncture. Maduro’s awful regime remains today. What a tragedy.
Then there’s China. Here too, Trump’s basic view was not all wrong — but his ability to act in our real national interests was wrecked by his personality disorders. Bolton casts him as never, indeed, actually concerned with our national interests, being fixated exclusively on his own personal interest. A prisoner of his deranged ego, Trump was bedazzled by the cunning flattery of China’s Xi Jinping. That’s how China took him to the cleaners.
Trump’s ignorance about the world was comprehensive. Yet believed he knew it all. A deadly combination. Clueless about his own cluelessness. At a meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump asked Bolton how we could be “sanctioning the economy of a country that’s seven thousand miles away.” Bolton deadpanned, “Because they are building nuclear weapons and missiles that can kill Americans.” Trump avowed, “That’s a good point,” then went over to Secretary of State Pompeo and related the exchange with Bolton, saying the latter “had a very good answer.”
“‘Yes, sir,’ said Pompeo. Another day at the office,” Bolton writes.
It’s not stupidity; Trump’s IQ must be quite high. The problem is a mind that’s a snakepit of psycho-pathologies.
Much in the book concerns threats posed by countries like North Korea, Iran, etc. But reading it suggests the most immediate threat to U.S. national security in those years was Trump.
Another episode Bolton calls “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any president do.” After an escalating series of 2019 Iranian attacks on U.S. and allied assets, White House discussions about responding militarily kept going nowhere.
Then Iran shot down a $146 million U.S. drone. Finally now, all the U.S. principals agreed on some retaliatory air strikes, and Trump ordered them. But at the very last minute cancelled them. Spooked by one staffer’s saying 150 could be killed, an estimate coming from nowhere. Bolton quotes Trump: “Don’t worry, we can always attack later, and if we do it’ll be much tougher.”
Yeah, right. That’s pure Trump. Pure bullshit. Obama, whom Trump loved calling weak, was indeed weak on stuff like this, but at least it was thoughtful weakness. Trump’s was thoughtless.
The U.S. political/governmental system always used to produce leaders with knowledge and experience. The citizenry had at least some level of trust and deference toward them and that system. No longer. Now it’s all resentment and disparagement toward those “elites,” in favor of “outsiders” who will “shake things up.” Trump the ultimate manifestation. Shook things up alright, and not in a good way.
Biden represents a reversion to past form, the most seasoned and experienced politician ever elected president. That very fact makes him an object of scorn. And it’s no guarantee of enlightened policymaking — attested by the Afghan fiasco, and I’ve called Biden’s Ukraine effort too squeamish. Yet it is, in comparison to Trump, almost a model of skilled, steady statesmanship. Bolton’s book shows that, in trying to work with Trump to shape U.S. foreign policy, he wasn’t dealing with a statesman but a maelstrom.
Few voters read stuff like this book. Few have more than the haziest, impressionistic notions concerning government and policy. Often based on a fun-house hall-of-mirrors of supposed information. Thus the enduring fantasy of Trump as a “good president.” That’s why re-electing him is a real if harrowing possibility.