John Bolton delivers a scathing indictment of Trump -- and of himself
Welcome to the “Never Trump” camp, John Bolton.
It took you a long time to get there. In 2016, you gave this vapid celebrity TV host credibility on the right by praising him for having a “serious” foreign policy vision. You did not join the “War on the Rocks” letter signed by 122 Republican national security professionals, including me, warning that Donald Trump would “make America less safe, and … diminish our standing in the world.” You chose to ignore those warnings. Was it perhaps because you wanted to preserve your lucrative career as a right-wing lecturer and talking head — and your ambitions for higher office?
But better late than never. Reading the excerpt from your new book in the Wall Street Journal, along with summaries of it in The Post and the New York Times, makes clear that you are confirming in every particular — and then some — the indictment of Trump by his critics. The president is every bit as ignorant, incompetent, capricious and heedless of the public interest as many of us have been saying while you stayed silent or supported him.
You write: “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” and you provide ample documentation for that grave charge. Indeed, you quote Trump asking Chinese President Xi Jinping to help his reelection campaign.
You then demonstrate Trump’s contempt for human rights when you quote him urging Xi to build concentration camps for China’s Uighurs — “which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.” His hostility for human rights abroad was matched by his hostility for human rights at home: You quote him saying that reporters were “scumbags” who should be jailed or even executed for failing to reveal their sources. This makes clear that the private Trump is every bit as odious as the public one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/17/john-bolton-delivers-scathing-indictment-trump-himself/
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