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Have been reading @AmbJohnBolton John Bolton's "The Room Where It Happened," in preparation for an @NPR interview on Monday's @MorningEdition. Throughout the book he evaluates the president as incompetent, unfit, and interested solely in himself. Some details follow.
This is not a new portrayal of the president, although Bolton delivers many details. A NYT review panned "fastidious note taker" Bolton for noting "the time and length of routine meetings" and other details. But of course the details from his notes add to his credibility.
Page 58: The president seeks to turn the US into a military contractor; thinks Arab nations would pay "cost plus 50 percent" for US troops in Syria and Iraq, so the US can wage war at a profit. Bolton knows it won't work but pitches the idea to Persian Gulf officials.
Page 73: The president talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in an "almost childlike" way, asks if he would like advance word on the president's decision whether to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal
Page 82: Bolton appears on Sunday TV shows. The president calls him to say he does well on TV, but asks Bolton to "praise him more." He wishes to be praised for his inconclusive diplomacy with North Korea's Jim Jong Un, which Trump says is like nothing before in history.
Page 87: The president compares his wooing of Kim Jong Un to his dating life. Says that when he dated women, he prefer to break up with them rather than be broken up with. Accordingly, he calls off a summit in Singapore before Kim can. Nevertheless, he attends the summit.
Page 89: Bolton reports that for Trump, intelligence briefings were not useful "since much of the time was spent listening to Trump rather than Trump listening to the briefers."
Page 94: The president is described as being "desperate" to meet Kim Jong Un "at any price," though he constantly changes his mind about how to go about it.
Page 181: The president blocks a statement criticizing Russia, and blocks another statement critiquing China's 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. "Trump seemed to think that criticizing...foreign governments made it harder for him to have good personal relations with their leaders."
Page 290: The members of the administration were so "fractured" in their views of China that it was "futile" for to mold a coherent approach. Trump gets wide agreement, including from Bolton, for taking China seriously. Bolton's concern is Trump's self-defeating approach.
Page 290: Bolton says he "scoffed" at Trump's failure to understand what a trade deficit was. Trump saw it purely as a profit and loss statement, when trade deficits and surpluses are far more complex.
Page 291: When the US moved to punish ZTE, a Chinese tech firm, the president backed off, making a concession to Xi Jinping for nothing; it was "policy by personal whim and impulse."
Page 292: China policy is made in a "chaotic" way, through random, repetitive meetings. (This is a consistent theme; on 56, Trump is described as the reason for bad meetings, "jumping randomly from one question to another, frustrating efforts to have a coherent discussion.")
Page 315: Faced with the crisis of the pandemic, the president responded with his "reflex effort to talk his way out of anything."
Page 317: Bolton defends a reorganization of the National Security Council Staff that eliminated an office of pandemic preparedness. Says it was irrelevant: "The internal NSC structure was no more than the quiver of a butterfly's wings in the tsunami of Trump's chaos."
Page 317: Bolton maintains the NSC still followed pandemics, and issued an early warning in 2020. "The NSC biosecurity team functioned exactly as it was supposed to. It was the chair behind the Resolute Desk that was empty."
Page 462: The president is suddenly obsessed with Ukraine. Thinks Ukraine is out to get him. Wants Bolton to call Ukraine's president and make sure Trump's personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, "to be sure Giuliani got his meeting in Kiev."
Page 464: Giuliani, feeds the president "nonsense" about Ukraine, which the president believes. Bolton doesn't understand why Trump is "suddenly interested" in military aid to Ukraine.
Page 475: Bolton concludes that Ukraine's president Zelensky and his team were "people we could work with;" President Trump nevertheless wants nothing to do with them.
Backing up a bit, Page 458: Bolton describes the president's "penchant to give personal favors to dictators he likes," interfering with prosecutions of companies from China and Turkey. "The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life."
Page 459: The president claims Vladimir Putin is "dying" to talk with him. "In fact, Trump was 'dying' to talk with Putin." So Trump calls to chat. There had been a moratorium on such calls, to punish Putin for seizing ships belonging to US ally Ukraine. Trump dropped that.
Page 489: Part of Bolton's conclusion speculates about a second Trump term. He says Trump's main interest has been re-election, and his fear of losing is one of the last "guardrails" limiting his behavior in any way. In a second term, Bolton says, that guardrail would be gone.
Bolton has sharp criticisms for many in the administration, and faces much criticism himself. There is so much more to discuss! But his portrayal of the president is relentless in length and detail.
