June 22, 2020: The Empty Chair behind the Resolute Desk

 

6/22/20: If you missed John Bolton’s interview on TV Sunday night, and don’t have plans to buy his book, the blogger can do a favor and provide highlights of what he told Martha Raddatz of ABC News. 

I can also save you the $32.50 it would cost to buy, and the many hours of tedious reading it would require to finish, since critics have been less than glowing in praise of Mr. Bolton’s prose.

This video from March 2022 pertains to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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“The line here that was crossed was trying to use a foreign government and to use the resources of the United States government to pressure that foreign government to do something to help Donald Trump politically.” 

John Bolton

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We do know six million Americans tuned in to watch, making the interview the highest rated program for the night. That means more than 325 million Americans were otherwise busy playing with cats, watching Korean baseball on EPSN, or wondering when in god’s name the coronavirus crisis will end.

 

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YOU SHOULD KNOW that Bolton’s portrayal of the president is unnerving. These are comments coming from a man who worked closely with the president for 18 months and studied him in the orange flesh. We’ve already highlighted some of Bolton’s claims. (See: 6/15/20; 6/18/20.) My duty as a blogger is to shine a light into all the darkest corners of Trump’s dishonest, dangerous administration. 

Martha Raddatz is a veteran journalist. During the hour-long show she elicits a number of startling responses from Mr. Bolton. 

 

“What’s good for Donald Trump’s reelection.” 

“I don’t think he’s fit for office,” Bolton says of Donald J. Trump. “I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job.” As National Security Advisor Bolton was tasked with offering advice on foreign policy and issues from around the world. Trump’s approach to all such matters, he said, was that there was no national security approach, no “guiding principle” that he could discern. Trump’s only focus: “What’s good for Donald Trump’s reelection.” 

What was Trump like, when it came to intelligence briefings, Raddatz asked? 

Most presidents take briefings almost daily. Under this president, Bolton said, “The intelligence briefings took place perhaps once or twice a week.” 

RADDATZ: Is that unusual?

 

BOLTON: It’s very unusual. They should take place every day. The president should read extensively the material he’s given. It’s not clear to me that he read much of anything [emphasis added].

 

Bolton added that briefings with Trump were different for another reason, one that shouldn’t surprise anyone who has seen this president in action. Most presidents, Bolton says, listen to the experts. During intelligence briefings with Trump, Donald talked half the time. 

(I am guessing here. But I am guessing Trump’s favorite topic was the greatness of Donald Trump.) 

Bolton adds that he saw “an unwillingness on the part of the president, I think, to do systematic learning so that he could make the most informed decisions.” In terms of the day-to-day stuff” a president deals with, it might be okay “to be erratic and impulsive and episodic and anecdotal,” all of which he says Trump was. In times of crisis “it becomes not only important but potentially dangerous if the president doesn’t maintain the focus on what’s in front of him.” 

 

“To the detriment of our country.” 

RADDATZ: You say that you were astonished by what you saw [a] president for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation?

 

BOLTON: Well, I think he was so focused on the reelection that longer term considerations fell by the wayside. So if he thought he could get a photo opportunity with Kim Jong Un at the demilitarized zone in Korea, or he thought he could get a meeting with the ayatollahs from Iran at the United Nations, that there was considerable emphasis on the photo opportunity and the press reaction to it and little or no focus on what such meetings did for the bargaining position of the United States, the strength that our allies saw or didn’t see in our position, their confidence that we knew what we were doing. And I think it became very clear to foreign leaders – that they were dealing with a president who just wasn’t serious about many of these issues, to our detriment as a country.

 

Bolton brings up Trump’s focus on getting a trade deal done with China. He wanted to be able to brag about the deal, but didn’t understand the complexities. For Trump, it was all about getting reelected. And for that to happen, he needed the continued support of American farmers. So, a deal with China meant “how many more soybeans” were they willing to purchase. 

Trump seemed not to care about, nor understand the global nature of the threat China posed. “There’s the Chinese advance in nuclear weapons; their weapons designed to counteract American presence in space, their effort to push us out of the South China Sea, and make it a Chinese province,” Bolton tells Raddatz, “which are issues that were very hard to get the president to focus on.” 

Mr. Bolton does say that there were some successes. He was happy to see that “the Defense Department budget was significantly increased over wholly inadequate defense spending levels in the Obama administration.”

 

As a liberal, I keep checking the math in this regard. You can find charts showing that the U.S. spends more for defense than the next seven, or eight, or even ten next biggest spenders. Combined! For Fiscal Year 2016, President Obama sent a request to Congress, asking for $585.3 billion. which you would think would buy a lot of planes and tanks and bombs. Then Trump came in and requested an “historic” increase, to $603 billion for FY 2017. As is so often true, when Trump is juggling numbers, truth was no part of his reckoning. He said he was calling on Congress to agree to a $54 billion dollar increase, or an increase of 10 percent. His own budget director, Mick Mulvaney, demurred, saying, the increase was only 3%.) 

RADDATZ: Describe to me, sum up Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

 

BOLTON: Well, I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think there is a policy….

 

Bolton describes the way policy was made in the Trump White House: “There’s a decision, there’s a decision, there’s another decision.”  There was no “coherence.” 

 

Trump is a cook without a clue. 

Or, as this blogger might put it, Trump operates as a cook with no recipe, a cook without a clue. You don’t know – and neither does he – if you’re going to end up with cake or pie or pumpernickel bread. Whatever it turns out to be, it won’t taste any good. 

The result in reality? 

“I think we’re in a weaker position around the world. I think we have given up leadership in a wide variety of areas,” Mr. Bolton says.

 

He does say he’s happy Trump got us out of the Iran deal, crafted by President Obama and several other big powers. So, there are fig leaves for Republicans to grab onto to cover their policy privates. 

Raddatz asks about the end results of such a scattershot approach. 

Bolton responds: “So I think whether it’s after four years or eight years, whoever succeeds the Trump administration is gonna have an enormous amount of repair work to do. To me, as a lifelong conservative, this is extraordinarily disappointing. It’s a huge missed opportunity.” 

Again, he offers a fig leaf, faulting Mr. Obama for “eight years, I think, of very poorly designed foreign and defense policy.” 

Then Bolton snatches the leaf away. 

He describes Trump’s decision to curtail military training exercises (what Trump called “war games”) involving U.S. and South Korean forces, all in an effort to placate Kim Jong-un, as “an act of folly.”

 

Again, Bolton saw the president as a man in pursuit of a “big deal,” even if the details of what that deal involved might not be good for the country. Raddatz asked about Trump’s efforts to cut a deal with Kim Jong-un and the North Koreans. 

RADDATZ: Why is this diplomatic initiative so important to President Trump, approaching it this way?

 

BOLTON: When we were in Singapore for the first summit, one of the things he said over and over again – was to ask how many press people were gonna be present for his final press conference. And I think the final number, it was a very large number – as it should have been, 400, 500.

 

By the time we left Singapore, he was at 2,000. And I think that number went up from there. That’s what he was focused on. That he had had this enormous photo opportunity – first time an American president has met with the leader of North Korea.

 

And he got enormous attention from it. I thought it was a strategic mistake. The U.S. itself got nothing from that. Donald Trump got a lot. The United States gave much more legitimacy to this dictator. And didn’t accomplish anything toward any meaningful discussion on the elimination of their nuclear weapons program.

 

To be clear, I don’t think North Korea is ever gonna voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons program. 

 

Bolton was also surprised by the way Trump dealt with autocratic world leaders. With Kim Jong-un, he lathered on compliments. “Every president has a style,” Bolton told Raddatz. “But the idea that – just this oleaginous – layer of compliments to this brutal dictator would convince him that you could make a deal with Donald Trump, I thought, was both strikingly naïve and dangerous.” 

(Word for the day: oleaginous: oily, greasy, obsequious.) 

(Second word: obsequious: obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree.) 

 

RADDATZ: And when President Trump talks about Kim Jong Un, he talks about these love letters, and these bromances. And – we love each other. Do you think he really believes that Kim Jong Un loves him?

 

BOLTON: I don’t know any other explanation. I think Kim Jong Un gets a huge laugh out of this.

 

Raddatz asks Bolton about a story from his book. Did President Trump ask Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to be sure to get a copy of an Elton John CD, “Rocket Man,” to the North Korean dictator?

 

(Available at Walmart for $13.28.)

 

BOLTON: Well, he gave him an Elton John CD, I think. And he tried to explain that calling him Rocketman was actually a compliment. And I don’t think we’ve heard from Kim Jong Un what he thought of Elton John’s song. But that would – that’ll be an interesting tidbit in history. But this is the kind of focus that leads you to wonder whether there’s an ability to discern what’s cosmetic here from what’s truly serious.

 

RADDATZ: And you think what he did there is dangerous?

 

BOLTON: I think when you’re dealing with the power of nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational regime, not taking that as seriously as he should have was a big mistake.

 

 

“I think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle.”

 

Bolton tells Raddatz he wrote the 500-page book because you can’t get a complete picture from tweets, op-ed pieces in the newspapers, or TV interviews like this. He says that our worst enemies, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, have all taken the measure of the man in the Oval Office: “But they see him as somebody who’s fundamentally not aware of the trade-offs he’s making.”

 

RADDATZ: So on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate Trump’s ability to make a deal on North Korea?

 

BOLTON: Well, I think it turned out, clearly at this point, to be zero. 

 

It’s possible that Bolton would rate Trump’s handling of threats from Russia by assigning the president a negative number. Raddatz doesn’t pose the question. She does ask about Trump’s relationship with Putin.

 

“I think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle,” Bolton says. “And I think he sees that he’s not faced with a serious adversary here. And he works on him, and he works on him, and he works on him.” 

 

Bolton adds that Putin “didn’t get everything he wanted….But I don’t think he’s worried about Donald Trump.”

 

Raddatz asks about Trump’s disastrous performance at the Helsinki summit in 2018. Even Republicans were appalled, as was this blogger, who rubbed his eyes in disbelief. I mean, I wasn’t surprised that Trump sounded like a fool. Still, when he stood next to Putin and said he believed the Russian dictator when he claimed Russian didn’t interfere in the 2016 election – even though U.S. intelligence absolutely said he did – wow, wow, wow. That was awful. (See: 7/16/18.)

 

Bolton calls it a “stunning moment.”

 

RADDATZ: You said you were frozen in your seat watching that.

 

BOLTON: I…I…I…I….I thought I wouldn’t get up. I didn’t know what to do. And it was…I describe in the book, we went through a lot of gyrations. And I say…to try and explain it…I thought Dan Coats, then the director of national intelligence, was close to resignation.

 

Ultimately, he didn’t resign. And the president…found a way of…of tryin’ to get out of it. But the fact is that the Russian threat to our elections and the threat from China, Iran and North Korea in different forms of cyber-attacks is very, very real.

 

And I viewed this before I joined the administration. I viewed it while I was there, and I view it today. These are attacks on the Constitution itself. These are acts of war against the United States. 

 

Raddatz asks Bolton about something he wrote in his book, about how other world leaders had “marked” the president. 

BOLTON: Yeah. I think – I think many of these foreign leaders – mastered the art of ringing his bells. And some were better at it than others. Chancellor Merkel of Germany had no success. I don’t think she tried. I think she just tried to say what her position was, like a normal leader would do, and expect a response. Didn’t get it. But the dictators seem to be better at it than the leaders of the democracy. And I just hope that pattern is not gonna persist if he’s reelected.

 

(Translation: Trump was easily duped. Our enemies, in particular, were able to flatter the Orange Fool, and bend him in the direction they desired.) 

 

Using national security to advance his own political position. 

RADDATZ: You wrote that Ukraine was a perfect example of Trump working for his own best personal interests. Explain.

 

BOLTON: [Trump believed the previous government in Ukraine had been] part of a conspiracy to take him down….

 

But he wanted a probe of Joe Biden in exchange for delivering the security assistance that was part of the congressional legislation that had been passed several years before. So that in his mind, he was bargaining to get the investigation, using the resources of the federal government, which I found very disturbing.

 

And I found it using national security to advance his own political position. Now, in the course of the impeachment affair, the defense of the president was he cares about the general corruption in the Ukraine. And that was on his mind. That’s utter nonsense.

 

There’s corruption all over the world. The corruption he was concerned about in Ukraine was that they tried to take him down. And that, to me, was something that I found very disturbing. So did a lot of other people in very senior levels in the government. I describe that in the book. And our objective was to find a way to get the president to approve the security assistance, the military aid, and get it delivered, and not tie it to an investigation of his political opponents.

 

Bolton tells Ms. Raddatz that he “believes it was widely understood at top levels of the U.S. government that a quid pro quo was in the works.”

 

If you remember the impeachment hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the sham trial in the U.S. Senate, you might remember that Republican lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Ron Johnson, Rep. Devin Nunes, and Rep. Jim Jordan were all on record. They barked and hollered and said there was no quid pro quo. Democrats were dastards for saying there was.

 

Here was Bolton, making it clear. There was:

 

RADDATZ: Can you tell us who else understood that?

 

BOLTON: Well, I think Secretary Pompeo understood. I think the Pentagon understood. I think the intelligence community understood. I think people in the White House understood. He wasn’t – [the] president wasn’t shy in voicing the view of the Ukraine – that, that’s what he wanted.

 

RADDATZ: I want to go to some specifics on Ukraine. August 20 comes a key conversation you had with President Trump about the security assistance. What exactly did the president say to you?

 

BOLTON: Well, he directly linked the provision of that assistance with the investigation. My objective here, people in the aftermath, in light of the impeachment investigation thought that those of us like Pompeo and [Mark] Esper and myself should have been sort of junior woodchuck FBI agents looking for evidence of impeachable offenses.

 

What we were all tryin’ to do was get the assistance released to the Ukraine. Because it was in America’s interests to do so. We’d worry about the Biden thing later. And I told the White House counsel, I told the Justice Department about these conversations. That’s what I thought I should do. Because I was very concerned about them. But my objective as national security advisor was to carry out the president’s own policy since he had agreed to the legislation to get this assistance sent.

 

RADDATZ: Back to the August 20 conversation. What exactly do you remember him saying?

 

BOLTON: Well, I lay out in the book my recollection of the sentence. But the linkage, the specificity of the linkage, I think, was unmistakable.

 

RADDATZ: He said in the book, he said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.

 

BOLTON: Right.

 

RADDATZ: So this was not the first time you heard the president himself directly link the investigation and the Ukraine aid? Or was it?

 

BOLTON: No. There were other conversations, some of which involved Rudy Giuliani, or references to Rudy Giuliani or others – where this connection was becoming clear. The conversation in August was the crispest indication of the linkage. But indirectly, and by clear implication, it had been growing for quite some time.

 

RADDATZ: The New York Times reported on that August conversation. And the president denied it, tweeting, “I never told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.” Is the president lying?

 

BOLTON: Yes, he is. And it’s not the first time, either. This is why I think it’s important to get these kinds of facts out on the table. 

 

…There was no doubt this was political. And what he was able to do during impeachment was convince people that somehow he only had the issue of corruption in the Ukraine in mind. And that was the least of his concerns.

 

 

“Deeply disturbing, possibly criminal.”

 

Raddatz asks Mr. Bolton why he decided not to testify before the House or Senate, since he has now made clear he found the president’s behavior “deeply disturbing, possibly criminal.” Didn’t he have an obligation to “tell the American people about this,” she asks?

 

Bolton tells her he was “fully prepared” to testify, if he “got a subpoena like everybody else who testified.”

 

And if you care, he says he thinks the Democrats in the House of Representatives badly mishandled the impeachment proceedings. “I think it was impeachment malpractice,” he says. 

Mr. Bolton believes the Democrats rushed the process to fit their political schedule. “Now, I find that conduct almost as bad and somewhat equivalent to Trump,” he tells Raddatz. In his view, they failed in “one of the gravest constitutional responsibilities the House of Representatives has, the power of impeachment.” 

That, comment about Democrats being “almost as bad and somewhat equivalent to Trump” makes the Fox News headlines (below). It’s by no means Bolton’s main point, or even his second, third, or tenth.

Bolton isn’t pulling punches. He tells Ms. Raddatz he’s fearful if Trump should manage to secure a second term. Impeachment didn’t sober him. The president “didn’t learn lessons from it, other than that he could get away with it, which leaves only the last guardrail …the election this November.” 

RADDATZ: This is what Michael Purpura said during the impeachment hearings, the president’s legal counsel: “Not a single witness testified that the president himself said that there was any connection between any investigations and security assistance, a presidential meeting, or anything else.” You could have been that person providing that testimony.

 

BOLTON: Yeah. And it would not have made any difference. The…

 

RADDATZ: How can you say that? How do you know…

 

BOLTON: Because minds – because minds were made up on Capitol Hill.

 

RADDATZ: You also use the phrase in the book that Trump’s pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept. Obstruction of justice as a way of life?

 

BOLTON: Look, these were things that I could see some evidence of. And they bothered me greatly. I talked to the attorney general about them. I talked to the counsel to the president about them. I’ve talked to other members of the cabinet about them and relayed my concerns. And they were very much on my mind.

 

RADDATZ: So you were and still are concerned that some of these things were criminal, impeachable, what?

 

BOLTON: I think the potential is there. I think it requires more investigation. It was not my job to be a FBI investigator, or a [Capitol] Hill investigator. I had plenty of other things to do. I referred the matters to the people whose responsibilities they were. And it was their responsibility to go from there.

  

Mr. Bolton reiterated points he had already made, regarding Vladimir Putin. Unlike Trump, the Russian leader prepares rigorously for meetings. He agreed, when Raddatz asked about the fiddle line, “And I can just see the smirk when [Putin] knows he’s got [Trump] following his line. It’s almost transparent.”  

Raddatz asks about claims in the book, that Trump was stunningly uninformed. 

BOLTON: Presidents don’t come to the office – no president does, knowing everything. So it’s no rap on anybody to say, “Well, they don’t know about strategic arms limitations talks.” But when you’re dealing with somebody like Putin, who has made his life understanding Russia’s strategic position in the world – against Donald Trump, who doesn’t enjoy reading about these issues or learning about them – it’s a very difficult position for America to be in[.]

 

RADDATZ: And you talk about other adversaries and dictators who looked at Donald Trump in the same way and marked him. Who are they?

 

BOLTON: Well, I think Xi Jinping would be right up there with Putin in his ability to look at Donald Trump and say, “This is somebody that we can move ultimately on our side.” 

 

Bolton returns to the Ukraine debacle. He understands that going after political opponents is not abnormal. “Politically, that’s fine. That’s what politicians do,” he says. “The line here that was crossed was trying to use a foreign government and to use the resources of the United States government to pressure that foreign government to do something to help Donald Trump politically.” 

He compares what Trump was hoping to pull off – to frame the Bidens if necessary – to prosecutions under Josef Stalin. He mentions, “Lavrentiy Beria [head of the secret police during Soviet times, who] used to say to Stalin, ‘You show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.’” 

He talks about Rudy Giuliani in somewhat the same role. He tells Raddatz, “There are more fairytales coming out of Ukraine than I think people can imagine,” many pushed by the Russians. 

Rudy believed them all. 

Trump believed Rudy.

 

Bolton says that the United States, or to be more precise, Trump, blew an opportunity. When the people of Ukraine elected a new president, the “overwhelming feeling of the Ukrainian people” was that they wanted corruption ended. They wanted to be “tied more closely into the West.” 

Instead, Trump placed Volodymyr Zelensky, the new Ukrainian president, in an untenable position. 

Bolton throws out another fig leaf, at least. He says he doesn’t think Vice President Pence knew there was a quid pro quo in the works. He says Mr. Pence worked hard to get Ukraine the assistance. Later, he says he thinks Pence has done “terrific work” in his role in the Trump administration. 

Raddatz asks Bolton about other incidents that “raised red flags.” Let’s keep it (relatively) short, and simply say there were others. 

RADDATZ: …When you put all that together, how can anyone come away, after reading your book, and make any conclusion other than that you don’t think he is fit for office?

 

BOLTON: I don’t think he’s fit for office. I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job….I’m not gonna vote for him in November….I don’t think he should be president. 

 

“The empty chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.” 

RADDATZ: I wanna close with where the country is right now and a couple of things….We’re in the middle of a pandemic. How do you think the president has handled that?

 

BOLTON: I think he’s handled it very poorly….The main problem the administration has had with coronavirus is the empty chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. In early January, people, whether on the staff of the National Security Council or the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere were saying, “This is a potential problem.”

 

Donald Trump didn’t wanna hear about it. He didn’t wanna hear about it because he didn’t wanna hear bad things about Xi Jinping. He didn’t wanna hear bad things about China covering up what had happened with the outset of the disease. He didn’t wanna hear bad things about the Chinese economy that could affect the fantastic trade deal he was working on, No. 1.

 

And No. 2, he didn’t wanna hear anything about an exogenous variable that could have a negative effect on the American economy, which he saw as his ticket to reelection….

 

And I think we lost a lotta time because of that. That is an example of making policy out of your hip pocket, without systematic consideration of what needs to be done, despite being warned by the people charged with making the warnings that it was coming.

 

RADDATZ: And his response to the killing of George Floyd?

 

BOLTON: Well, I think the issue of resolving racial tensions in America is one that’s not gonna be solved overnight. I think the president’s reaction – from his own political point of view, which again, is the only thing he thinks about – was very misguided.

 

RADDATZ: How do you think history will remember Donald Trump?

 

BOLTON: I hope it will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can’t recover from. We can get over one term. I have absolute confidence – even if it’s not the miracle of a conservative Republican being elected in November.

 

Two terms, I’m more troubled about…

 

RADDATZ: You say President Trump is unfit for office and you’re talking about the election, do you worry about his commitment to the democratic process?

 

BOLTON: I don’t think he fully understands the democratic process. I don’t think he fully understands the Constitution. I don’t necessarily view that as malevolent. But I view it as very (laughs) concerning that he does not appreciate the proper role of the presidency. 

 

In other words, you can see why Team Trump did everything they could to delay or kill the release of John Bolton’s book.