Despite John Bolton’s new tell-all book, The Room Where It Happened, not having been released yet and being the subject of an unusual lawsuit by the Trump Administration to stop its publication due to, allegedly, it not being stripped of all classified material, quotes are flooding the political pundit websites.
Conservative Jay Nordlinger on National Review:
[F]rom Bolton:
As the trade talks went on, Hong Kong’s dissatisfaction over China’s bullying had been growing. An extradition bill provided the spark, and by early June 2019, massive protests were under way in Hong Kong.
I first heard Trump react on June 12, upon hearing that some 1.5 million people had been at Sunday’s demonstrations. “That’s a big deal,” he said. But he immediately added, “I don’t want to get involved,” and, “We have human-rights problems too.”
That is consistent with the Trump we know, and have long known. During the 2016 election cycle, Joe Scarborough pressed Trump on Vladimir Putin — particularly the Russian leader’s killing of political opponents. “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also,” said Trump.
After Trump was sworn in, Bill O’Reilly pressed the new president on the same issue. “There are a lot of killers,” said Trump. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
Back during the campaign, Trump was asked about Erdogan and Turkey. The candidate said, “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”
In Cold War days, we conservatives slammed the Left for “moral equivalence.” Now this phenomenon is in our own house, which is astonishing.
Yet not surprising. Chronic mendacity in a leader is predictive of the corruption of the principles of the Party, no? Y’all supping with the devil.
Liberal Steve Benen:
While I have not yet read the book, the latest reporting describes a rather brutal indictment of a president who is corrupt, ignorant, mocked by his own team, hostile toward the rule of law, and guilty of all kinds of official misdeeds — including trying to get both Ukraine and China to help with his re-election campaign.
Nothing new there, but I suppose confirmation from yet another insider is nice.
You up on the whole legal fight over John Bolton’s book? (Wonkette kickback linky here!) Make sure you get current on that, because ready or not, HERE COME THE BUGFUCK EXCERPTS.
We had been hearing reports that Bolton just really thought the House impeachment managers did a dereliction of duty by focusing on Trump trying to force Ukraine to help him steal the 2020 election. Why? Because, according to Bolton, they should have investigated him for doing that like A HUNDRED ELEVENTY BILLION times. That really makes us want to kick Bolton in the dick, because of how he could have totally gone to the impeachment hearings and said that to Adam Schiff’s face.
Which places Bolton in a fairly dark shadow, really.
Liberal (?) David Ignatius of WaPo:
Bolton is the hero of nearly every anecdote in the book. Indeed, for a memoir that is startlingly candid about many things, Bolton’s utter lack of self-criticism is one of the book’s significant shortcomings. Nearly every policy discussion is an opportunity for Bolton to say that he was right, people should have listened to him, he knew it would never work, he was vindicated. His only problem is that, having burned so many bridges with this book, Fox News may not give him a future platform to explain how right he is.
Given how long and disastrously Bolton enabled this president, his self-satisfaction becomes annoying. So does Bolton’s trademark disdain for the foreign policy establishment (who he likes to deride as the “High-Minded”). Sometimes, his antagonism toward negotiations is so reflexive, you almost sympathize with Trump’s desire to talk with forbidden adversaries, such as North Korea and Iran.
It’s telling that one of the criticisms Bolton makes about Trump’s opening to North Korea was that he was acting like a diplomat. “The real irony here was how similar Trump was to the Foreign Service.”
Similar to the Foreign Service diplomats? Really? Bolton doesn’t seem to like traditional American diplomacy, he’d much rather bomb his way to the goal, or so it seems from his public utterances, and maybe his contempt is coloring his judgment. But I think Ignatius is completely out in the left field stands with this:
This book ought to be a wake-up call, finally, to Republicans who have slavishly defended Trump and belittled his critics. Bolton took his time in telling us the truth, and he should have done more when it was his duty during the impeachment inquiry. But it’s all here. In boxing, you’d call it a knockout punch.
I don’t think it’ll have any influence on cult followers. It may influence a few independent voters that are still on the fence, but so few that it’ll be lost in the statistical noise of polls. Cultists will simply shrug him off.
I’m sure there are other opinions out there, but I’ll end the quotes with Ryan Watson on the conservative site The Resurgent:
President Trump’s critics from all sides are jumping all over it as truthful. I am taking a far more skeptical view – not because I support the President, but because I disbelieve John Bolton’s character and purposes here. I liked Bolton to some extent – while a bit hawkish, he did have a tendency to be anti-globalist and anti-UN. However, rather than go before Congress as he was requested multiple times to do, he is attempting to use the current environment and election-year timing to sell a book. It is a master stroke of publicity which even the President’s team almost has to react toward.
As it has been with most scandals leading up to an election, anything that brings this much publicity so close to election day is immediately suspect. We saw something similar in Justice Kavanaugh’s hearings, where harassment claims with little evidence were brought forward for his confirmation, and we see it time and again preceding election time.
John Bolton is not doing the nation any favors by publishing a book. He had his chance to make a true principled stand.
Instead, he’s dancing the Potomac Two-step.
Like Watson, I am deeply suspicious of Bolton. As does Trump, Bolton seems to have a narcissistic personality disorder which requires that he always be right, mixed with a belief in the violent imposition of his – not necessarily American – opinions on other nations. His desire to bomb Iran goes back decades, and rumors abound concerning the dubious ethics of the tactics he’s used, when in official posts, to get his way.
Taken together, they transition from a merely ugly portrait to a much darker picture of a man whose relationship to truth has to be questioned.
All that said, I’m sure there will be many details which seem to be corroborated by other sources of information. But, like Watson, I cannot help but think that Bolton, if he truly cared about this nation, could have testified at the House hearings on the articles of impeachment. While several former and then-current Department of State employees testified to Trump’s mendacity and extortionate tactics, Bolton’s former position as National Security Advisor to the embattled President would have been the senior-most and most privy to Trump’s misdeeds. Could the Republicans have ignored his testimony as well? Certainly. But it would have served them ill to do so.
And then there’s the White House response to the book. They knew it was coming, and for months. They appear to have chosen a strategy of drag it out, but that’s quite a chancy approach. Why didn’t they just buy Bolton off? Sure, the White House is full of second and third rate personalities, but for once I’m wondering if there’s a subtle subterfuge going on here.
That is, are Trump and Bolton actually working together here?
Because of these suspicions, which I grant are out on the fringes a little , I’m treating this more as a salacious book of juicy rumors, rather than a book of facts, and consequently am not planning to acquire and read it. Future events may change my mind – such as Trump being led off in handcuffs – but at present, there are enough doubts in my mind of the book’s veracity that I’m not allocating any of my somewhat scarce time to this one.
It may be just another distraction. Political theater, if you will.
