What John Bolton’s book doesn’t reveal – why Donald Trump acts the way he does
- Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has written a brutal tell-all story of the US president and his men
- But given Trump’s tweets and the recent impeachment hearings, the book contains few surprises, and makes no attempt to explain why Trump acts as he does
As an insider catalogue of White House calamity and presidential dysfunction, John Bolton’s memoir of his 16 months as US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser may have no equal.
In Bolton’s telling, the bedlam of the Trump White House never stops. He recounts crisis after crisis on page after disturbing page of The Room Where it Happened, seemingly in stunned astonishment at what he is witnessing. “Has there ever been a presidency like this,” an exhausted West Wing colleague asks Bolton during a brief respite from the chaos. “I assured him that there had not,” replies Bolton, a veteran of three previous Republican administrations.
There has never been such a score-settling memoir by a recently departed top White House official. Bolton eviscerates his president and former colleagues ruthlessly, and in his view they deserve it.
Yet so much of Trump’s presidency already has spilled forth into public view at impeachment hearings, in flurries of tweets and in his own rambling public monologues that Bolton’s details don't often shock; they deaden.