‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord,” reads a famous passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. John Bolton has provided a secular version of that cosmic payback in his account of Donald Trump’s presidency, “The Room Where It Happened.”
Bolton offers new tidbits about Ukraine, the issue on which Trump was impeached and where Democrats desperately sought Bolton’s testimony. He confirms an aide’s account that Bolton viewed Trump’s Ukraine machinations as a “drug deal,” provides new evidence that “Ukraine security assistance was at risk of being swallowed by the Ukraine fantasy conspiracy theories.” In sum, he says, “the whole affair was bad policy, questionable legally, and unacceptable as presidential behavior.” This account should deeply embarrass Republican senators who offered unblinking defenses of Trump’s Ukraine actions during the impeachment trial.
The great achievement of this book is that it links the Ukraine fiasco to Trump’s other foreign policy misdeeds. Indeed, Bolton argues that the Democrats committed “impeachment malpractice” because the Ukraine focus “provided no opportunity to explore Trump’s ham-handed involvement in other matters . . . that should not properly be subject to manipulation by a President for personal reasons.”
Bolton’s takeaway line: “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.”
Perhaps the most startling new disclosure is that Trump sought political help from China’s Xi Jinping, just as he had expressed support for a Russian email dump in 2016 and Ukrainian political favors in his famous July 25, 2019, phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
According to Bolton, in a June 18, 2019, phone call with Xi about trade matters, Trump “then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election . . . pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.” Bolton also notes that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un at the February 2019 summit in Hanoi said that “he didn’t want Trump to do anything that would harm him politically,” to which Bolton adds in his text, “Oh great,” one of the snarky literary asides scattered throughout the book.
Bolton should have taken these insights about Trump to House impeachment investigators, or surely to Senate impeachment jurors. The closest he seems to have come to seeking accountability was a visit to Attorney General William P. Barr while the Ukraine “drug deal” was unfolding. Bolton says he “wanted to brief him on Trump’s penchant to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” including Xi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That comment begs for further investigation.
Bolton offers a damning review of nearly every theater of Trump’s foreign policy: His coddling of Kim “made me ill”; his last-minute reversal of a retaliatory strike against Iran after the shoot-down of a U.S. drone was “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do”; his withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria was a “huge mistake”; the “slowness and lack of agility” of his Venezuela policy was “painful to watch.”
A veteran bureaucratic infighter, Bolton dishes dirt about everyone he doesn’t like, and it’s a very long list. Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley was “untethered” and a “free electron”; former national security adviser Michael Flynn was “inadequate” and “self-destructed”; senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner was a meddler who was “doing international negotiations he shouldn’t have been doing (along with the never-quite-ready Middle East peace plan)”; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was secretive, too willing to make concessions that Trump wanted and so overly subservient to the boss that a pushback on arms control was “a rare occasion of Pompeo’s being explicitly critical of something Trump did.” One intriguing note is how often Pompeo (like Bolton) talked of resigning.
But it’s Jim Mattis who’s Bolton’s favorite punching bag. Every dozen pages there’s another shot at the former secretary of defense. He’s “looking for excuses not to do much of anything” in retaliating against Syrian chemical weapons use; he would “predict gloom and doom when he didn’t get his way” on policy; he used “spite” as a common tactic, prompting Bolton to observe “they didn’t call him ‘Chaos’ for nothing.”
Mattis’s resignation in December 2018 appears to have gratified Bolton. He quotes Trump’s parting line: “He’s leaving . . . I never really liked him.” And Trump’s bizarre claim: “He’s a liberal Democrat, you know that, don’t you?”
Bolton is the hero of nearly every anecdote in the book. Indeed, for a memoir that is startlingly candid about many things, Bolton’s utter lack of self-criticism is one of the book’s significant shortcomings. Nearly every policy discussion is an opportunity for Bolton to say that he was right, people should have listened to him, he knew it would never work, he was vindicated. His only problem is that, having burned so many bridges with this book, Fox News may not give him a future platform to explain how right he is.
Given how long and disastrously Bolton enabled this president, his self-satisfaction becomes annoying. So does Bolton’s trademark disdain for the foreign policy establishment (which he likes to deride as the “High-Minded”). Sometimes, his antagonism toward negotiations is so reflexive, you almost sympathize with Trump’s desire to talk with forbidden adversaries, such as North Korea and Iran.
It’s telling that one of the criticisms Bolton makes about Trump’s opening to North Korea was that he was acting like a diplomat. “The real irony here was how similar Trump was to the Foreign Service.”
Many previous books have revealed Trump’s bizarre machinations and musings, but none so damagingly as this one by a conservative former supporter. At times, Trump rambles during a long flight to Iraq about how he may drop Mike Pence for Haley as vice president in 2020, and whether he’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize. Discussing Trump’s ever-vacillating views about China, Bolton says, “This was policy by personal whim and impulse.”
As Bolton describes his running conversation with the president, it’s a series of broken records. Trump rambles through repeated tirades about Europeans who don’t pay enough for defense, the perfidy of Mattis who’s trying to box him in, the need to indict John F. Kerry for alleged Logan Act violations for interfering with Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. And most especially, the need to withdraw American troops from Syria, Afghanistan, Germany, South Korea.
The abiding problem, says Bolton, was Trump’s lack of a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish, beyond dominating the news cycle. This was foreign policy by disruption, conditioned on Trump’s view that he could charm or intimidate anyone (seemingly unaware that he was being played by the toughest and most ruthless people in the world).
“Trump was not following any international grand strategy, or even a consistent trajectory,” Bolton observes. “His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy.” Bolton comments at another point: “He opposed ‘endless wars’ in the Middle East but had no coherent plan for what followed withdrawing US forces.”
Perhaps the most damning comment Bolton offers, in the end, isn’t about foreign policy but Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. “Trump’s reflex effort to talk his way out of anything . . . even a public-health crisis, only undercut his and the nation’s credibility, with his statements looking more like political damage control than responsible public-health advice.”
John F. Kelly, Trump’s harassed chief of staff, mutters to Bolton at one point, “Has there ever been a presidency like this?” To which Bolton replies tartly: “I assured him there had not.”
This book ought to be a wake-up call, finally, to Republicans who have slavishly defended Trump and belittled his critics. Bolton took his time in telling us the truth, and he should have done more when it was his duty during the impeachment inquiry. But it’s all here. In boxing, you’d call it a knockout punch.
The Room Where It Happened
A White House Memoir
By John Bolton
Simon & Schuster. 577 pp. $32.50
