Trump’s John Bolton Defense: He Had No Friends - Vanity Fair

riariaga.blogspot.com

In his highly anticipated new book, John Bolton details several instances beyond Ukraine in which President Donald Trump sought to manipulate foreign policy for his personal political gain, cozied up to authoritarian leaders, and was “stunningly uninformed” about world affairs. Trump’s defense against the belated but nonetheless convincing portrayal boils down to: Bolton is a big jerk and nobody likes him.

“He is a liar,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal of his former national security adviser. “Everybody in the White House hated John Bolton.”

While it is true that many, many people hate John Bolton—the man’s bottomless thirst for war has kept him from being embraced by liberals as it has others in Trump’s orbit who have turned on him—the fact that he is widely loathed is hardly a defense against his claims. Indeed, all of Team Trump’s efforts to refute or silence Bolton have more or less confirmed his account. Though Trump has said, as he did again in a tweet Thursday morning, that Bolton’s book is “made up of lies & fake stories,” he and his allies’ efforts to prevent its publication have been predicated on the claim that the memoir is stuffed with classified information. “It can’t be both untrue and classified can it?” Democratic Senator Brian Schatz asked Wednesday.

If Trump’s attempts to discredit Bolton’s account have failed, it’s not just because the president, in his fevered desperation, has been even less convincing than usual; it’s also because Bolton’s allegations, while shocking, are not really particularly surprising. “Every insider account of Trump says basically the same thing,” Vox founder Ezra Klein wrote on Twitter Wednesday, as episodes from The Room Where It Happened circulated in media reports. “There are always a few new details, but the takeaway is always, always that he is exactly who he appears to be in public.”

Trump is still fighting to keep the book from publication, even though damning excerpts have already come out in the press and Bolton will soon run through the highlights over the next week in interviews with Martha Raddatz and Stephen Colbert. On Wednesday, he got the Department of Justice involved; the department filed for an emergency temporary restraining order against Bolton to keep him from publishing next week. But even this seems destined to fail, as the book is out of Bolton’s hands at this point and only he, not his publisher, has been targeted by the administration’s legal muscle. “The majority of this motion is largely irrelevant, as Bolton himself can be enjoined by the DOJ until they’re blue in the face and it won’t matter one bit,” national security lawyer Bradley Moss tweeted Wednesday. “Bolton no longer has control or authority over the book: his publisher does.”

The question, then, is, Why? Why mount this over-the-top attack on a book that, for all its damaging and remarkable claims—sending Kim Jong Un an Elton John CD?—serves only as additional confirmation of what we already knew about Trump’s erratic and even bizarre behavior? The latest claims, which might have had more of an impact several months ago when Trump was in the throes of impeachment, are unlikely to register all that high on the political Richter scale now with the nation in domestic turmoil and crisis. Surely, stories of Trump soliciting reelection help from Xi Jinping and giving the thumbs up to the construction of prison camps in the country don’t look so good, particularly in an election year in which he’s attempted to portray himself as tough on China. But seeking to explain away the allegations of incompetence and turpitude by claiming he believed the man he hired to oversee America’s national security was “crazy,” as he told the Wall Street Journal, and a “disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war,” as he put it on Twitter, would only seem to underscore his carelessness and poor judgment. “I don’t think he’s fit for office,” Bolton says of his former boss in a clip of his upcoming ABC News interview. “I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job.”

Search

Trump’s John Bolton Defense: He Had No Friends - Vanity Fair

0 Response to "Trump’s John Bolton Defense: He Had No Friends - Vanity Fair"

Post a Comment