Former national security adviser John Bolton told me Tuesday that former President Donald Trump’s flaws are vastly different in kind and degree from those of other officials he has criticized.
On the Republican side, Bolton said, he would “vote for a cardboard cutout” before he ever voted for Trump, and he said he would never vote for Trump even in a general election — he would cast a write-in vote instead.
Bolton has been making media rounds in the past week, discussing a new foreword to The Room Where It Happened, his tremendously readable memoir of his experiences during Trump’s presidency. His new foreword’s thesis is that “a mountain of facts demonstrates that Trump is unfit to be president,” and in it, he predicts terrible occurrences if Trump retakes the Oval Office.
What’s most striking, though, is his insistence that Trump is not just wrong or incompetent but a different kind, a dangerous kind, of wrong and incompetent. And this isn’t a mere policy disagreement in which Bolton, who has a partly undeserved reputation as a super-hawk, thinks Trump isn’t forceful enough in projecting American power. This is Bolton “warning … America’s voters to help avoid our worst fears from coming true.” Other candidates might not be optimal, but Trump is far, far worse than that.
To understand the nature of this distinction, I asked Bolton about how Trump compares to former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, whose tenure in the Trump administration overlapped his own and who comes under repeated criticism in Bolton’s book. In it, he blasted her for a habit of committing “process foul[s],” for showing a “magnetic attraction to television cameras,” for sometimes having “a political tin ear” while acting as a “free electron” whose off-the-cuff comments occasionally caused diplomatic “bleeding.”
Still, Bolton told me, “I don’t think there’s any comparison. I think she’s a decent person” who, very much unlike Trump, would be “adequate” for the presidency.
“I think Nikki should say now that she will continue in the race all the way to the [Republican] convention,” Bolton said. “… She carries the flag now for all non-Trump candidates. It’s an extraordinarily steep hill to climb, but I am looking for any possibility that might keep Trump from office. I think for the good of the party and certainly for the good of the country, I hope she does that.”
Bolton, who has been a stalwart conservative on domestic matters, too, since volunteering in high school for Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, said there is no doubt that Haley is philosophically “a conservative Republican.” By contrast, Bolton writes that Trump “has no political philosophy … since he cares almost exclusively about his own interests.”
Worse, Bolton said, Trump conflates his personal “relations with a counterpart head of state” as being the same thing as “U.S. relations with that government,” completely “devoid of looking at the specifics, … the nature of the threat, and so on.”
That is why, in his foreword, Bolton wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin “knows his mark. He will relish a second Trump term…. Indeed, it is a close contest between Putin and Xi Jinping, who would be happiest to see Trump back in office.” In Tuesday’s interview, Bolton elaborated: “They know how to play on his ego. They know how to flatter him” to get what they want.
Regarding both Putin and brutal North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Bolton said only extraordinary efforts by top appointees kept Trump from giving away the store in his first term. Trump, by now, has chased away so many talented advisers that the only people left for his second term would be “neutered aides fearful of firing,” Bolton writes. Nobody will be around to pull Trump back from the brink of awful capitulations to the dictators he so admires or, in the case of Kim, says he loves.
In the interview, Bolton gave the example of Trump’s second meeting with Kim in Hanoi, Vietnam.
“The central North Korean ploy in every negotiation the past 30 years is they try to make a deal where they make commitments to dismantle their nuclear program in return for economic benefits,” Bolton said. “The pattern that has played out each time is that the tangible economic benefits come up front, [but] they somehow never get around to” fulfilling their commitments on the nukes.
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Bolton said at the Hanoi meeting, as in other negotiations, Trump came dangerously close to a similarly flawed agreement. Trump’s main goal, Bolton said, was to be able to brag about “getting a ‘deal’ and declaring it a success almost without respect to what the actual terms of the deal are.” Bolton said nobody strong will be around in a second term to keep Trump from such dangerous folly.
Bolton is right. Voters should heed him.
