Former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump and ultra-right wing neoliberal uber war hawk John Bolton, who pretty much wanted to use the US military to attack any country that even dared to look crosswise at the US, has given an interview about his upcoming book that describes Trump in ways that those of us who are sentient and not blinded by the glare of Trump worship have known all along, concluding that he is ‘not fit for office.’.

John Bolton, ahead of the release of his explosive new book about his 17 months at the White House, called Donald Trump not “fit for office”, claiming the president doesn’t have “the competence to carry out the job”.
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In a preview on Good Morning America Thursday, Bolton spoke to Martha Raddatz, chief global affairs correspondent, calling Trump a “stunningly uninformed” man whose ignorances could be easily manipulated by foreign adversaries.

“He was so focused on the re-election that longer-term considerations fell by the wayside,” He said. “There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for Donald Trump’s re-election”.
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“I was sick at heart over Trump’s zeal to meet with Kim Jong-un,” he wrote according to an advanced copy seen by ABC, adding he would be “hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during [his] tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations”.

Other news reports from reporters who have read the book prior to its release provide more details that are interesting, though sometimes gossipy.

Bolton describes several instances where Trump waffles on China-related issues after conversations with Xi, notably on the mass concentration camps Beijing was using to imprison and “re-educate” Uyghur Muslims. Bolton writes that according to the US interpreter in the room during a conversation between Xi and Trump at the G-20 meeting in June 2019, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was “exactly the right thing to do.”

Bolton adds that Trump didn’t want to sanction China for their crackdown on the Muslim minority because of ongoing trade negotiations. “Religious repression in China was also not on Trump’s agenda; whether it was the Catholic Church or Falun Gong, it didn’t register,” Bolton writes.

Bolton describes a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un in which the North Korean despot blamed troubled relations between his country and the US on the actions of prior administrations. Emphasizing the meetings he and Trump had held, Kim told the President that they could dispel mistrust and work quickly toward a nuclear agreement. After Trump told Kim that he would seek Senate ratification of any agreement with North Korea, Bolton writes that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo passed him a notepad. On it was scribbled the message, “he is so full of shit.”
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Bolton says the weekly meetings to discuss issues, chaired by Trump in the Roosevelt Room or the Oval Office, more closely resembled college food fights than careful decision-making, with no lower-level effort or involvement by the relevant agencies to sort out the issues and the options. “After these sessions, had I believed in yoga, I probably could have used some,” Bolton wrote.

It’s a theme Bolton returns to more than once, describing a mercurial President who has little interest in learning how the federal government worked. Instead, he describes Trump as very focused on how decisions will play in the media.

Trump also asked if Finland was part of Russia, did not know that the UK had nuclear weapons, kept confusing the names of the Afghan presidents, claimed that Venezuela was really a part of the US and that it would be cool to invade it, and was willing to grant personal favors to foreign leaders he liked, such as intervening in investigations into them.

So basically the book says that Trump is an ignorant idiot whose only interest is in how his actions play out in the media, his standing in the polls, and his re-election. But we all knew that, didn’t we? And people like Bolton helped put him in office even though these qualities were patently obvious long before. Careerists like Bolton and others bought the bill of goods Trump was selling and now they are trying to scurry away from him as fast as they can, and make a quick buck while doing so.

UPDATE: Early reviews of the book have been scathing.

Early reviews of the book have not been favourable. The New York Timessaid the memoir was “bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much”. Filled with “minute and often extraneous details”, the review continued, it “toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged”.

The Washington Post said that “for a memoir that is startlingly candid about many things, Bolton’s utter lack of self-criticism is one of the book’s significant shortcomings”, while NPR found that Bolton “clearly does not expect to attract the casual reader, or anyone else unable to digest sentences such as this one on the third page: ‘Constant personnel turnover obviously didn’t help, nor did the White House’s Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all)’.”