John Bolton: Author of bombshell book on Donald Trump is no Mr Nice Guy

For some reason it jumped into my head after reading about the revelations contained in John Bolton’s forthcoming book The Room Where It Happened.

Already there is a real stooshie over Bolton’s account of his 17 months as US President Donald Trump’s security adviser.

In fact, so damning are the accusations in the book, Trump’s administration has launched a lawsuit to stop the sale of Bolton’s tell-all tale, which is due for general release next week.

But going back to the title of that Alice Cooper song. For a while, you see, Bolton was regarded by Trump as a nice guy. As the president saw it, he was a player and someone prepared to take one for the team.

But when Trump memorably fired him by tweet, all that changed. Bolton was no more the nice guy and in response resorted to type. I say type because, the fact is, John Bolton never was and never will be one of the nice guys of US politics.

If Bolton has one saving grace that sets him apart from Trump, it’s that he’s intelligent. But it’s precisely for that reason the multifaceted Bolton is dangerous.

As one New York Times journalist wryly observed recently, the lavishly moustachioed Bolton, in looks and actions, comes across as an “unlikely hybrid of Ned Flanders and Yosemite Sam”.

Like the fictional character Flanders from the US animated TV series The Simpsons, Bolton can be your cheery next-door-neighbour pillar of America type one minute. The next, however, he’s more like Yosemite Sam from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, a warmongering gunslinger with a hair-trigger temper.

Bolton’s great passions in life have always been knocking down his perceived adversaries, domestic or foreign. In foreign policy terms they really don’t come much more hawkish than him. Russia and North Korea were always in his crosshairs, while regime change in Iran was and remains a festering obsession for him In short, Bolton is a man who likes pushing America into wars while at the same time pushing it out of meaningful treaties that make the world a better place.

Even five years before the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, Bolton, as part of the influential right wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute, was signing letters to the White House urging “a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts” to remove Saddam Hussein.

This, too, is a man who in the early 2000s, worked to scupper the International Criminal Court on the grounds that the US should not cede its sovereignty.

His disdain for Europeans is also well known, calling them as he does “EUroids” because he considers them a pain in the backside.

According to Simon and Schuster, the publishers of Bolton’s book, it describes Trump’s “scattershot decision-making process” as well as the security adviser’s astonishment that he was working for “a president for whom getting re-elected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation”.

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The irony here is obvious, coming as such remarks do from a man like Bolton, who chose to forsake his duty while in government. For 17 months while in office, he never uttered a peep about the concerns that now all of a sudden vex him in his book.

By his own admission he was witness to multiple acts by Trump that could – and should – have been cited in the impeachment of the president. Where was Bolton’s voice during the months-long investigation of Trump over the Ukraine scandal?

As CNN’s Elie Honig rightly pointed out a few days ago, Bolton’s testimony would have unequivocally established that there was a quid pro quo and that Trump was conditioning foreign aid to Ukraine on investigations of his political opponents.

It would have made a mockery of the insistence from the White House that there was no “first-hand evidence” of this, as such.

Likewise Bolton remained schtum over Trump’s active solicitation of election assistance from Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“I saw these developments as a threat to US strategic interests and to our friends and allies,” Bolton tells us in the book.

Really? Why then not speak out if the good ol’ US of A means that much to him?

FRANKLY, it’s incredible that only last year Bolton refused to appear before a formal congressional proceeding, but now finds time to spill his guts on this and a wide range of politically discomfiting issues.

Judging by early sights of the book’s content, however, some of the more colourful “revelations” Bolton cites don’t really come as a surprise. I mean is it really such a shock that Donald Trump didn’t know the UK was a nuclear power?

Should we really be taken aback by the news that this US president would endorse Chinese concentration camps and human right abuses of ethnic Uighur Muslims, if it helped gain Chinese help and improve his re-election prospects?

The short and obvious answer to such questions is no. How curious it is, though, that Trump only yesterday was quick to sign a measure to potentially sanction Chinese officials for their role in interning Uighurs.

That the president’s motive has as much to do with looking good in the face of Bolton’s claims tells us lots about Trump in election year with an America in meltdown.

As for Bolton, making lots of money is his obvious incentive. In that regard he’s no different from the Trump presidency he tries to call out in his book.

In many respects he was well suited within the Trump administration. Mercenary, opportunist, selfish and in near congenital need of self-aggrandisement, the main reason Bolton was fired was because the administration was not big enough for two such egotists.

There is something truly noisome in him presenting the book’s insights as a service to America. That there is an inside story to tell of the goings on in The Room Where It Happened and Trump’s murky dealings is in no doubt. But the fact that Bolton chose to put self above country is the real revelation here.

He can try all he likes to present himself as a principled whistleblower, but Bolton is fooling no-one. As I said before, he never was and never will be one of the nice guys.