Are Americans meant to feel grateful to John Bolton, the walrus-moustached, bellicose former national security adviser to Donald Trump? It’s tempting to say yes, as he serves up an election-year memoir that provides a veritable arsenal of ammunition for Democrats to hurl at the president between now and 3 November.
As the title suggests, The Room Where it Happened supplies first-hand confirmation that everything Trump’s enemies have long said about him is true, from the trivial to the grave. Trump is comically ignorant. At one point, he asks his chief of staff if Finland is part of Russia and, at a Chequers meeting with Theresa May, he registers surprise on hearing that the UK is a nuclear power. The Trump Bolton describes is useless and incompetent, running a dysfunctional White House: one chapter is titled “Chaos as a way of life”.
He’s also unhinged. Trump became obsessed with getting a CD of Elton John’s Rocket Man through to Kim Jong-un as a gift, even if that meant breaking US sanctions on North Korea. He thought “it would be ‘cool’ to invade Venezuela”. He told aides that journalists who refused to reveal their sources should be jailed or executed.
The president’s most trenchant critics are often accused of hyperbole or hysteria, charged with “Trump derangement syndrome”. But this account, written not by some NPR liberal but by a Fox News hawk, confirms that we’re right to speak of the wickedness of Donald Trump. Perhaps the most damning of all of Bolton’s revelations is the blessing that the president gave to a truly appalling and continuing atrocity. At a G20 meeting in Osaka, China’s Xi Jinping explained to Trump why his country was “basically building concentration camps” in Xinjiang province for the internment of a million or more members of the largely Muslim Uighur minority. Bolton writes: “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do.”
Thanks to Bolton, we now have yet more evidence that the impeachment case tried against Trump earlier this year was rock solid – that he did indeed, as the first article of impeachment alleged, abuse his power for political gain. Bolton confirms the quid pro quo that should have seen Trump removed from office, whereby Trump refused to release $391m in congressionally mandated security assistance for Ukraine unless and until that country’s president promised to dig up, or manufacture, dirt on Joe Biden.
What’s more, Bolton makes clear that Ukraine was no one-off. Urging foreign powers, including hostile ones, to intervene in US domestic politics is a Trump habit. Bolton recalls how the president began “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win” in November, urging China to buy more US soybeans and wheat, in order to boost Trump in the crucial farm states. In return, Trump would lower trade tariffs on Chinese goods.
Bolton has provided the proof that while Trump may pose as a strongman, he is a coward in the face of those he deems stronger. Bolton knew Trump wouldn’t have the steel to confront Vladimir Putin over Russian attempts to subvert US elections, so he set out the case on a piece of paper: that way, Trump would merely have to hand the paper to Putin to register US objections. But Trump wouldn’t even do that.
Similarly, Bolton reveals that the US president promised to halt criminal cases against two companies, one Chinese and one Turkish, to placate Xi and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This was “obstruction of justice as a way of life”, writes Bolton, born of Trump’s penchant for giving “personal favours to dictators he liked”.
The campaign ads for Biden, currently leading Trump by 50% to 38% in the battleground states, almost write themselves. Some Democrats will feel grateful for that. And yet to read Bolton’s book is to feel ever more furious – not at Trump, whose vileness and venality have been visible from the start, but at Bolton. If he knew all this, if he saw all this up close, why didn’t he speak out earlier, when it could have made a difference?
The question is sharpest in the context of impeachment. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives asked Bolton, who had already quit the White House by then, to testify, but he refused. He wanted to be dragged to the witness table, forced to talk by a subpoena. That would have taken months of legal wrangling, time the Democrats calculated they did not have (probably rightly, as it turned out, given the coronavirus pandemic).
And so, without Bolton, Democrats had to rely on secondhand witnesses, allowing Republicans to pretend the impeachment case rested on hearsay. He said he would testify to the Senate if it voted to call him, but the Republican majority in that body would never let that happen. So Bolton kept his secrets, spilling them instead for a $2m publishing deal.
Incredibly, Bolton has the cheek to criticise the Democrats for their mishandling of impeachment, for failing to expose the wider pattern of Trump’s corrupt behaviour. Well, whose fault was that? He knew better than anyone the scale of the problem, but he did not speak out. Bolton is complaining that the fire department never put out the blaze next door, when it was he who refused to call 911.
In this, Bolton has ample company. He stands with those senators who would not subpoena his testimony, and with all those Republicans who have acted as enablers of Trump from day one. They pose and preen as patriots, with the flag on their lapels and their constant invocations of national security, and yet when the republic faced a danger unlike any in its history, they failed to do their duty. John Bolton does not deserve Americans’ thanks. He deserves their scorn.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
