by John Bolton
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As
President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of his 453
days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves.
The result is a White House
memoir that is the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump
Administration, and one of the few to date by a top-level official. With almost
daily access to the President, John Bolton has produced a precise rendering of
his days in and around the Oval Office. What Bolton saw astonished him: a
President for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if
it meant endangering or weakening the nation. “I am hard-pressed to identify
any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by
reelection calculations,” he writes. In fact, he argues that the House
committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly
on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full
range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and
attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them.
He shows a President addicted
to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply
suspicious of his own government. In Bolton’s telling, all this helped put
Trump on the bizarre road to impeachment. “The differences between this
presidency and previous ones I had served were stunning,” writes Bolton, who
worked for Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43. He discovered a President who thought
foreign policy is like closing a real estate deal—about personal relationships,
made-for-TV showmanship, and advancing his own interests. As a result, the US
lost an opportunity to confront its deepening threats, and in cases like China,
Russia, Iran, and North Korea ended up in a more vulnerable place.
Bolton’s account starts with
his long march to the West Wing as Trump and others woo him for the National
Security job. The minute he lands, he has to deal with Syria’s chemical attack
on the city of Douma, and the crises after that never stop. As he writes in the
opening pages, “If you don’t like turmoil, uncertainty, and risk—all the while
being constantly overwhelmed with information, decisions to be made, and sheer
amount of work—and enlivened by international and domestic personality and ego
conflicts beyond description, try something else.”
The turmoil, conflicts, and
egos are all there—from the upheaval in Venezuela, to the erratic and
manipulative moves of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, to the showdowns at the G7
summits, the calculated warmongering by Iran, the crazy plan to bring the
Taliban to Camp David, and the placating of an authoritarian China that
ultimately exposed the world to its lethal lies. But this seasoned public
servant also has a great eye for the Washington inside game, and his story is
full of wit and wry humor about how he saw it played.
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