The elephant in ‘The Room’
Four long months after Senate Republicans’ craven vote to acquit President Trump of impeachment articles they hardly considered, that allconsuming political battle seems quaint and diminished. For all his betrayal of duty unearthed by the House, Trump is displaying his gross unfitness for office in public and at far greater cost as he presides over a deadly pandemic and nationwide protests over racism and police violence.
Former national security adviser and current bestselling author John Bolton refuses to be deterred from his payday by a precipitous fall from relevance or his failure to provide his account back when it mattered. To hear Bolton tell it, the impeachment was an understatement in its own time.
According to advance excerpts of Bolton’s toolongawaited tellall, “The Room Where It Happened,” President Trump didn’t just try to bully Ukraine’s president into smearing presidential contender Joe Biden, as the House impeachment inquiry detailed. He also told Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he would interfere with a federal investigation of a stateowned bank. And he implored China’s Xi Jinping to help him win a second term. In fact, Bolton writes, “I am hardpressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.”
While Bolton is a careful, intelligent and experienced narrator, he is not an invariably reliable one. More than one reviewer has noted that the only major character in “The Room” who is spared his withering criticism is Bolton himself. And given his acrimonious break with Trump, he has every reason to exact revenge — at this late date, served not just cold but positively frigid.
But his account is in keeping with what we know about not just the Ukraine affair but also Trump’s embrace of Russian election meddling. As for China, the president urged it to investigate Biden in front of cameras on the White House lawn.
Moreover, Bolton, despite his bellicose foreign policy and facial hair, has until now erred on the side of appeasement with respect to Trump and the Republican establishment that has enabled the president. Bolton did, after all, work for him for nearly a year and a half, enough to make him his longestserving national security adviser to date. And when the time came for Bolton to tell America what he knew, he balked, refusing to willingly cooperate with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry and vowing to fight a subpoena in court.
In the end, Bolton seemed to want to have it both ways by testifying against Trump without alienating fellow Republicans by appearing too eager to do so. By the time he belatedly offered to spill it to the Senate, the process was in the Republicans’ hands and it was too late.
It takes a remarkable degree of selfregard to emerge from this dereliction and accuse Democrats of “impeachment malpractice,” which Bolton does on the grounds that they should have examined Trump’s other inappropriate interactions with foreign leaders. Anyone can wish the inquiry had been broader or more effective, but few have possessed Bolton’s wasted power to singlehandedly make it so.
The president’s response to Bolton’s account, a probably vain attempt to block its publication, bolsters Bolton’s allegations and echoes the impeachment articles. Instead of refuting his estranged adviser, Trump followed his abiding instinct: obstruction.