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.
For someone who saw Trump closer than most, he makes little effort to explain or even speculate about the source of Trump’s behaviour. He falls back on the standard Washington explanation for Trump’s actions: power for its own sake. It’s a motivation that Bolton, an ambitious, Yale-educated lawyer shunted into secondary posts in previous administrations, understands well.
But that is true, more or less, for every president. The deeper questions are what drives Trump, how the Republican Party that Bolton spent his career serving could unite around him and what lasting damage his presidency will have done to the country. On those questions, Bolton is silent.
Getting through the dense parts of Bolton’s narrative produces a numbing effect that must closely resemble what it feels like to serve in Trump’s badly divided White House.
A religious note taker, Bolton writes in lawyerly, lumbering prose, delivering a mostly chronological accounting of meetings, hallway chatter and Oval Office confabs. The account is only enlivened when Trump appears and says something off the wall. Bolton then offers his blistering judgment.
It’s revealing that Bolton opens the book with a quote from the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo: “Hard pounding, this, gentlemen. Let’s see who will pound the longest.”
The pounding he delivers bears little resemblance to predecessors’ books. It is nothing like Henry Kissinger’s magisterial three-volume memoir of his time as secretary of state and national security adviser during the Nixon and Ford administrations – a sweeping account of Kissinger astride the world.
Bolton was apoplectic when Trump announced to his shocked advisers in the summer of 2019 that he wanted to invite leaders of the Taliban – whom the US had been fighting for close to two decades in Afghanistan – to Camp David for peace talks.
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“Only Trump could conceive of the president of the United States meeting with these thugs,” he writes. The idea was later abandoned after a suicide bombing in Kabul killed an American soldier.
Coming out with the book now, five months before the election and five months after Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, has made Bolton a target for the White House, which has called him a traitor and a liar, and for Democrats who say Bolton should have revealed all this when it mattered.
In an epilogue, Bolton defends his failure to come forward during the impeachment, arguing that the House narrowed its inquiry solely to Trump’s moves to hold up military aid to Ukraine until it agreed to investigate former vice-president Joe Biden and his son. Bolton says he viewed the manoeuvre as a partisan exercise, not a comprehensive investigation of Trump’s “ham-handed involvement in other matters”.
Only Trump could conceive of the president of the United States meeting with these thugs
The Senate, he noted, declined to subpoena him during the impeachment proceedings. “I was content to bide my time,” Bolton writes, about the timing of his book. “I believed throughout, as the line in Hamilton goes, that ‘I am not throwing away my shot’, especially not to please the howling press, the howling advocates of impeachment, or Trump’s howling defenders.”
Bolton has long shared Trump’s disdain for the State Department diplomats, intelligence analysts and journalists that make up the capital’s foreign policy establishment. He spent his career tweaking that establishment while making his way up its ranks. But it was his feisty performance as a pro-Trump commentator on Fox News that caught Trump's eye, not his policy views.
Passed over early in the administration for a top job, Bolton finally caught on after Trump tired of H.R. McMaster. The Army general had been brought in as national security adviser after Trump’s first choice, Lieutenant-General Mike Flynn, flamed out within weeks of taking office.
Bolton says he can't explain Trump’s affection for Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders whom Bolton detests. Trump delighted in needling Bolton for his hardline views in front of Kim Jong-un. And as Bolton’s time in the White House lengthened and their disagreements mounted, Trump increasingly excluded him from key decisions.
He seems mystified that Trump cares little about the ideological foreign policy battles that have driven the hawkish Bolton his entire career – hostility toward arms control, a preference for regime change in Iran and North Korea and confrontation with Russia and China.
“Trump’s favourite way to proceed was to get small armies of people together in the Oval or the Roosevelt Room, to argue out all these complex, controversial issues … one outcome one day and a contrary outcome a few days later,” he writes. “The whole thing made my head hurt.”
