The Room Where It Happened

June 29, 2020
Former national security advisor Bolton (Surrender Is Not an Option) harps on his foreign policy pet peeves (Iranian aggression in the Middle East, North Korea's nuclear threat), critiques former colleagues (Jim Mattis, Nikki Haley), and defends his decision not to testify in the House impeachment inquiry in this lacerating yet tiresome slog through his time in the Trump administration. Readers eager to hear what Bolton has to say about the Ukraine pressure campaign (namely, that Mick Mulvaney probably came up with the idea of using security assistance as leverage against Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky, and that the policy was "baked in" to White House dealings with Ukraine) will have to skip ahead to the last 50 pages. First, Bolton runs down seemingly every meeting, meal, phone call, and international summit of his 18-month tenure, touting his own achievements, such as pushing Trump to finally withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, and blaming failures on a lack of policymaking structure within the White House and on Trump's vindictiveness, erraticism, and habit of forming competitive "bromances" with authoritarian leaders. The book's most serious allegations, including that Trump offered to "take care of things" when Turkish president Recep Erdogan complained about a U.S. Justice Department investigation, are buried within the avalanche of details. The bombshell to chaff ratio in this well-informed yet self-serving account is tilted punishingly in the wrong direction.

July 15, 2020
The latest tell-all--or, at any rate, tell-some--indictment of a dysfunctional presidency. Bolton, a foreign policy hard-liner, writes that Donald Trump first courted him to serve as deputy secretary of state. Nothing doing, Bolton responded: "State could not be run successfully from that level." It took back and forth before Bolton finally got to be in charge of something, named national security adviser. Given Trump's contempt for the intelligence community, it stands to reason that Bolton's job would be fraught, but he lasted a surprisingly long time--17 months, several lifetimes in the Trump administration. Bolton found allies and foes, but mostly the latter: He mistrusted Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster from the beginning while he suspects Mike Pompeo of negative leaks at the end of his tenure. But the author directs most of his ire toward Trump, and the book, while thoroughly self-serving--where was this information during impeachment proceedings?--delivers a damning portrait of a man quick to suck up to despots and seek their aid in holding onto his office. Instead of begging for China's help in the coming election, as many media outlets portrayed a meeting with Xi Jinping, Bolton writes that Trump "stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome." Such muted statements, he writes, resulted from the government's pre-publication review, which often amounted only to a directive to "take out the quotation marks." Readers who supply the missing punctuation will find a Trump who is whiny, self-absorbed, unprepared, and spectacularly ill-informed at every turn--hardly breaking news. Notes Bolton in closing, though, it's worth considering that a second-term Trump might be an unintended boon: "Democrats will find themselves far more pleased substantively with a 'legacy'-seeking Trump...than conservatives and Republicans," whose political coffins Trump would nail shut. More confirmation of malfeasance than fresh news, but the message is clear: Voter, beware.

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