The United States of America showcases plenty to chew on. Donald Trump is trying to scuttle the publication of the book, The Room where it Happened, penned by the former National Security Adviser, John Bolton.
That rather impetuous presidential initiative has astonished the world in an election year not the least because it flies in the face of the certitudes that had once governed the country. Simon and Schuster, the venerated publisher, must be rather too shocked for words.
While further comment must await a review of the work, it is hard not to wonder whether obstruction of justice is today a way of life in America. It would be presumptuous, therefore, in the manner of the President, to readily bin the book as a “compilation of lies intended to make me look bad’… even before an incisive read.
Chiefly, the revelations have exposed the ignorance of the White House on a welter of critical matters; pre-eminently these relate to the United Kingdom. President Trump, for instance, was ignorant that the UK had nuclear weapons; that Oriel College would vote in favour of the statue of Rhodes falling (it did on Thursday); and that work had begun on the Manchester liquid air battery.
While Trump is straining every nerve to block the book’s publication, Bolton has informed the world that the US President had pleaded with the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, to help him get re-elected ~ quite a change from 2016 when he had depended on President Vladimir Putin, and thus stoking a controversy within the United States.
Nay more, he had encouraged China’s concentration camps for more than a million Muslims ~ which have led to US sanctions ~ as “exactly the right thing to do”; and was willing to halt criminal investigations to “give personal favours to dictators he liked”.
Bolton describes a pattern of corruption in which Trump routinely attempts to use the leverage of US power on other countries to his personal ends. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Bolton writes, adding that he took his concerns to the attorney general, William Barr.
Trump refused to issue a statement marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, saying “that was 15 years ago” (it was the 30th anniversary). Bolton’s book quotes Trump as saying that invading Venezuela would be “cool” and that it was “really part of the United States”.
It says the summit diplomacy with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, was intended as spectacle, with Trump happy to “sign a substancefree communique, have his press conference to declare victory, and then get out of town”. Mike Pompeo mocked the President behind his back, slipping Bolton a note saying: “He is so full of shit.”
Arguably, the book seemingly suffers from two shortcomings ~ it is bereft of empirical evidence. Further, Bolton would have been more convincing had he spilled the beans if he had agreed to testify before the House impeachment hearings.