JOHN BOLTON: SO MUCH MORE TO DISLIKE THAN HIS BOOK

6/22/20

John Bolton is a jerk.   John Bolton always has been a jerk.  And John Bolton will always be a jerk.   I didn’t want to use the word “jerk,” but the nature of this blog as a source of education for the entire family forbids me from using the compound word I would have rather used.

Given my generally conservative politics, one might guess that my displeasure with Mr. Bolton arises from The Room Where It Happened, A White House Memoir, the soon to be released “Guess what I heard?” collection of tales from the Trump White House.   But one would be wrong in this supposition; long time readers know that my distaste for Mr. Bolton goes back many years, at least to the second Bush administration.   That Mr. Bolton’s scribbling harms President Trump’s chances at re-election are not a big deal to yours truly for at least four reasons:

·         Mr. Bolton hurts his credibility by venturing from the eminently believable to the laughably outrageous.  For example, the charge that Mr. Trump believes that Venezuela is, or was, part of the United States is just idiotic.   Even today’s typical high school student, deprived of exposure to geography in favor of modern “education’s” insistence on the generalized indoctrination we call “social studies,” realizes that Venezuela is on a different continent and never was a U.S. colony, at least in the formal sense.  (Doesn’t he?)  So one doesn’t have to be an ardent Trump hater to realize that this assertion on Mr. Bolton’s part is so outrageous that it calls into question the rest of Mr. Bolton’s narrative.

·         Even if we assume that most of the tales Mr. Bolton tells are true, the generalized picture he presents of Mr. Trump as something of a self-consumed lout whose vanity is exponentially more vast than his knowledge of foreign policy is nothing new and will change few votes.

·         Mr. Trump’s chances at re-election were microscopic before Mr. Bolton started scribbling.  See PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL NOT BE RE-ELECTED, written on 4/22/20, and note the earliness of that display of perspicacity.

·         While, considering the alternative, I would prefer that Mr. Trump not lose, whether he gets re-elected still results in yours truly engaging in an internal soliloquy worthy of Hamlet.

It’s not that Mr. Bolton’s literary display of petulance doesn’t bother yours truly, but the source of my distaste does not lie in politics but, rather, in the quaint old notions of statecraft, patriotism, and honor.  Mr. Bolton should have had the decency to keep his mouth shut on the sensitive national security matters he discusses in his book.   How open and straightforward can people be when they are continually nagged by the notion that what they say might be shared, and selectively so, with millions, some of whom are not nice people and have very little compunction about displaying their level of hostility, throughout the world?   And in which facet of his job does the president, whoever s/he might be, need honest straight talk more than s/he needs it in foreign policy?   Even though this President only wants to hear what he wants to hear, there may be a day in distant future when we have a president who knows what s/he is doing and would like to get a wide range of opinions, freely and unsparingly delivered, before taking actions of the gravity involved in many foreign policy actions.   Having a petulant (wo)man-child with a penchant for revenge in the same room is not conducive to the advancement of such honest, often displeasing and unpopular, opinions.

All that having been said, the problem that Mr. Bolton presents for Mr. Trump lies not so much in the content of the book Mr. Bolton has produced.   The problem that Mr. Bolton presents is that his very appointment in April of 2018 was an exemplar of the very lack of judgment, bordering on recklessness, that Mr. Trump displays in his scattershot approach to his job.  

Mr. Trump got elected in 2016 for a number of reasons, most of which had their genesis in revulsion at his opponents, both in the primary and especially in the general elections, and the political establishment they represented.   One of the major issues on which many of Mr. Trump’s voters, and certainly this voter, could nearly wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Trump rather than merely disagree with his opponents, was foreign policy.   Other than Senator Rand Paul, Mr. Trump was the only Republican in the 2016 primary field who spoke out with great vigor and commitment, bordering on passion, against the Bush/Obama foreign policy that saw thousands of American troops stationed, and dying, all over the world for reasons that were never clearly, let alone honestly, delineated.    People didn’t see it as America’s role to expend blood and treasure for nebulous reasons that seemed to benefit, if anybody, certainly not the working-class families whose kids were sent off on Messrs. Bush’s and Obama’s excellent adventures.  People were, to put it simply, sick and tired of America’s being the global policeman that candidate George W. Bush promised we wouldn’t be if he were elected only to renege on this promise nearly instantaneously upon being elected.   The people were further agitated when nothing of substance changed under President Obama, despite his being elected to a large extent on his promises to reverse Mr. Bush’s blundering, seemingly pointless, ridiculously expensive and outright dangerous foreign policy that set back American diplomatic progress by decades.  In 2016, when most of the Republican field displayed obsequious fealty to the disaster that was Mr. Bush’s foreign policy and the Democrats selected Mr. Obama’s chief diplomat as their standard-bearer, Mr. Trump derided the Bush/Obama, fight to the last working class kid for who knows what foreign policy   While it was not his foreign policy alone that got Mr. Trump elected, it certainly garnered him enough votes to put him in the White House in his close race with Mr. Obama’s Secretary of State.  

So imagine the shock to those of us who voted for Mr. Trump largely on the basis of his opposition to the Bush/Obama approach to foreign affairs when he appointed John Bolton, one of the chief architects of this policy, as his national security advisor?   It was a betrayal that would have garnered more attention if the public hadn’t by that time grown so accustomed to the President’s casual attitude toward things like principle and ideals.   The selection of Mr. Bolton confirmed for us that Mr. Trump was a liar, a man of no principle, a man with not even the vaguest familiarity with the people he was putting in charge, or a combination of the all of the above.   Yours truly vowed NEVER to vote for Trump as long as Mr. Bolton, whom I would refer to as Mr. Bush’s Nostradamus if I didn’t think Mr. Bush were at least as culpable as Mr. Bolton in his ruinous foreign policy, remained national security advisor.   Not only was Mr. Bolton’s foreign policy under Mr. Bush perhaps the seedling from which the ruin of our nation will spring but also Mr. Bolton’s appointment lent credence to those who argued that Mr. Trump had, and has, no clue regarding the issues he is charged with considering and has a tendency to forget on Tuesday what he said on Monday.  

So while Mr. Bolton’s book may not be as harmful as many imagine to Mr. Trump’s nearly non-existent re-election chances as many suppose  (See, again, my 4/22/20 post.), the very resurfacing of Mr. Bolton reminded us of the lack of introspection, and perhaps the lack of character, of the man we have in the White House, and Mr. Bolton did so without producing one page of his soon-to-be-forgotten screed.

One more thing…

The breathless attention that the press is paying to Mr. Bolton’s bout of bumptious braying is yet further proof that If the media weren’t so pathetic, they’d be hilarious.   The same people who insist that we must pay unwavering attention to every utterance of Mr. Bolton now that he is ripping Mr. Trump are the same crew that seethed with even more contempt for Mr. Bolton than does yours truly when Mr. Bolton was more or less in charge of foreign policy in both the second Bush and Trump administrations.   They were right then; they are wrong now.   But these are not people to let intellectual consistency and honesty interfere with a jihad of the type in which they are currently engaged.