White House National Security Advisor Ambassador John Bolton talks to reporters Wednesday, May 1, 2019, outside the West Wing entrance of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Originally posted January 29, 2020.
At Spectator USA, Daniel McCarthy explains that, rather than condemning President Trump, John Bolton’s book “suggests that President Trump is innocent of the charges on which Democrats are trying to impeach him.” Bolton is starting a war against the president, but McCarthy believes it “is just another war in which Bolton can add to the general misery while enriching himself, and still not win.” He writes (abridged):
The first sentence of the New York Times report on John Bolton’s tell-all memoir about his time in the Trump White House contains a bombshell — but not the one that everybody thinks. The real revelation is that it suggests that President Trump is innocent of the charges on which Democrats are trying to impeach him.
Bolton is no friend to President Trump or to the America First cause that got Trump elected in 2016. He is the antithesis of what Trump campaigned on: he personifies the hawkish ideologues in the Republican party who start wars they can’t win and continually cry out for more interventions. Like many an Iraq war enthusiast, Bolton is enjoying a reputational inversion thanks to liberals’ Trump derangement: long a stock villain, he’s now become a hero to the resistance.
His role in whipping up the Iraq invasion is forgiven and forgotten — including the time he threatened the family of a Brazilian diplomat at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons who refused to go along the Bush administration’s case for war. ‘You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don’t comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you,’ Bolton told him. ‘We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York.
Bolton wants to stop the foreign policy that Trump promised at any cost.
He impeded it from within the administration, and now he aims to win attention — and lucrative book sales — by sabotaging Trump in the midst of his Senate trial.
But Bolton’s own account, as it has been reported so far, does not back up the Democrats’ charges. This is just another war in which Bolton can add to the general misery while enriching himself, and still not win.
Read more here.
This morning the President fired back at Bolton on Twitter:
….many more mistakes of judgement, gets fired because frankly, if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty & untrue book. All Classified National Security. Who would do this?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2020
