Australia and the World Past and Present

The following is based on John Bolton’s USA Today interview with Susan Page in 2020.

Bolton begins by saying that Trump is “a President who doesn’t base his decisions on philosophy, doesn’t have a grand strategy, doesn’t follow consistent policies. It’s like a continuing random walk.”

Bolton says that Trump is totally focused on reelection.

He concedes that the President has got “an astute political antennae”.

But Bolton makes a distinction between being able to win the Presidency and being able to govern.

The former Ambassador doesn’t mince his words saying, “I don’t think he’s competent to be President. I think he is almost proud about not learning much about the subject matter of national security.”

Bolton believes that Trump has debased the body politic in the US. He notes that this decline didn’t begin with Trump. Democrats and Republicans were already becoming more and more divided and were already in their respective trenches before Trump arrived on the scene. But Trump has turbo charged the decline. Leadership starts at the top. Words matter. Tone matters. And there has never been a US President who talks like Trump. Bolton calls it “alley talk” and argues that it does not bode well for civil society in America.

The Maryland native is critical of Trump’s photo opportunities with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. He believes that the US got very little out of Trump’s rapprochement with Kim and that the North Korean nuclear program simply continued on unabated, despite Trumps overtures.

Bolton’s geopolitical world view can be summed up like this: international relations = great power competition + nuclear rogue states + radical Islam.

He suggests that when the US recedes from geopolitics and turns inwards towards isolationism, the world becomes more disorderly.

This interview took place in 2020, before Trump had lost the election to Biden. At this time Bolton was worried that Republicans would lose control of the Senate. That is not the case today. Republicans are in control of the Senate right now.

Interestingly, when asked if he though that Trump would not accept losing the election Bolton remarked, “I don’t think there’s any chance of that happening.”

So clearly he misjudged just how far Trump was willing to go. But so did many others. They just couldn’t imagine a President so immune from the traditions of convention.

By this stage it was evident that Bolton was concerned about Trump intervening in individual legal cases.

Many of Bolton’s revelations are perhaps not that surprising.

Much was already known about Trump’s personality and leadership style.

The view from those inside of the administration was largely the view of those outside it – that disorder reigned.

Bolton didn’t need to join Trump’s administration. He chose to jump onboard. He convinced himself that it wouldn’t be as dysfunctional as it was. He hoped that his experience would help keep the ship steady, that Trump would listen to him and would be prepared to be persuaded by other people. Bolton misjudged Trump. But so did countless others.

Bolton, schooled in the philosophy of how geopolitics and national security are supposed to work came up against someone who broke the mould. Trump just didn’t care about any of that. He didn’t care about Bolton’s “grand strategy”.