Trump’s White House  “A bad place to work”

As the White House struggles to block the publication of the latest book about life in the Trump administration, most of the cats are already out of the bag of former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

His work – The Room Where It Happened – portrays a president ignorant of basic geopolitical facts and whose decisions were frequently driven by a desire for re-election reports the BBC.

Trump critics have asked why Mr Bolton did not speak up during impeachment hearings, while the president himself has called his former top adviser “incompetent” and a “boring old fool”.

 Some of the eye-raising items highlighted by the BBC are:

Trump wanted help from China to win re-election – Bolton describes a meeting between Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a G20 meeting in Japan last year.  The US president “stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election [in 2020], alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton writes.

“He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

Building internment camps was the ‘right thing to do’ – China’s treatment of the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities has brought international condemnation, with about a million people thought to have been detained in camps in the Xinjiang region. In Bolton’s book, when Xi defended building the camps the US president suggested he approved of China’s actions.

“According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

‘Personal favors to dictators’ – “Trump was willing to intervene in criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked and offered help to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2018 in a US investigation into a Turkish company over potential violations of Iranian sanctions. Trump agreed to “take care of things” and that the prosecutors involved were “Obama people”.

The Democrats should have gone further with impeachment – Bolton backs up Democrats’ allegations that President Trump wanted to withhold military aid to Ukraine to pressure it into investigating his rival Joe Biden, a claim which sparked their impeachment efforts against him. He criticizes the Democrats, saying they committed “impeachment malpractice” by just focusing on Ukraine. He argues that if they had broadened the investigation more Americans would have been persuaded that President Trump had committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” necessary to be removed from office.

Bolton  declined to testify in the process when it was in the House of Representatives late last year

Trump suggested he wanted to serve more than two terms – Trump told China’s leader that Americans were keen for him to make the constitutional changes needed for him to serve more than two terms.  “Xi said the US had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.”

Trump didn’t know the UK was nuclear power – Britain was the third country after the US and the Soviet Union to test an atomic device, in 1952. But that the UK is part of the club of nuclear-armed states appears to have been news to  Trump. One extract told of a 2018 meeting with then UK Prime Minister Theresa May in which an official referred to Britain as a nuclear power. Trump is said to have replied: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?” The remark, Bolton said, “was not intended as a joke”.

Finland part of Russia – Bolton says there were other gaps in President Trump’s knowledge. Before a meeting with Russian President Putin in the Finnish capital Helsinki, he is said to have asked if Finland was “kind of a satellite of Russia”.

According to Bolton, intelligence briefings were not “terribly useful” since during most of them “he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand”.

Invading Venezuela  ‘cool’ – In discussions on Venezuela, Trump said it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela, and that the South American nation was “really part of the United States”.

The Putin fiddle – In an interview with ABC News to be broadcast in full this Sunday, Bolton says “I think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle.”

 Ridiculed by allies- The book contains several examples of White House officials mocking Trump. Bolton describes a dysfunctional White House, one in which meetings resembled “food fights” rather than considered efforts at policy-making.

When he arrived at the White House, the then chief of staff John Kelly warned him, “this is a bad place to work, as you will find out”.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, considered a loyalist, is said to have written a note describing Trump as “full of shit”