The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton, review: Trump emerges not unscathed, but more human

When Donald Trump came to power many conservatives weren’t sure what to do. Trump agreed with them on some things but not everything, and while conservatives fancy themselves as natural outsiders, they weren’t sure if putting a reality TV star into the White House was a good idea. John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor for 16 months, has written a compelling book that explains why it doesn’t work and why he had to resign, although Trump insists that he fired him first. The President calls him “a disgruntled boring old fool who only wanted to go to war.” Rumour has it, he also never liked his moustache. Who was right, Trump or Bolton? Bolton is certainly the superior intellect. He’s a controversial figure on the US Right – a foreign policy hawk – and when Trump hired him, there was alarm and confusion. Trump had famously denounced the Iraq War and promised to pull out of the Middle East; Bolton backed Iraq and wanted to confront Iran and North Korea. But Bolton is, like Henry Kissinger, a hybrid of an intellectual and a public servant, and insists that he actually went out of his way to put his own views aside and to be his master’s voice. He was appointed, one suspects, not for his philosophy but the fact that after several months of trying simply to ignore the Washington bureaucracy, the administration had realised it needed to co-opt and reform it, and Bolton - with years of experience under Reagan and Bush - knew how to get things done. The problem, implies Bolton, was not having a boss he disagreed with but that boss being so dysfunctional that it was impossible to pursue a coherent agenda. Trump could be very rude, with no respect for rank; meetings resembled “college food fights”. He had a basic ignorance of the world (he allegedly asked if Finland was part of Russia) and although treaties can take years to negotiate, Trump believed he could solve all problems in a face-to-face meeting in a single day.

source https://news.yahoo.com/room-where-happened-john-bolton-061358694.html