Let it be known that John Bolton isn’t the only former Trump official with an axe to grind, and they’re not all aimed at the boss, either. On the heels of Bolton’s splashy memoir release and media tour taking aim at Donald Trump’s decision-making and leadership, another former White House official has taken aim at Bolton. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ new memoirs contains a personal attack on Bolton’s imperiousness and attitude, according to an excerpt reported by Axios:
Axios has a first look for you at a fiery passage from a book that’s coming this fall from former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Speaking for Myself.” She writes that, during President Trump’s state visit to London last year, “Bolton was a classic case of a senior White House official drunk on power, who had forgotten that nobody elected him to anything.”
Sanders tells me that Bolton regularly traveled separately on foreign trips and, in London, disregarded a request to wait so the rest of the staff wouldn’t get stuck in traffic:
- “Bolton apparently felt too important to travel with the rest of us,” Sanders writes. “As we were ready to depart for the Winfield House,” the U.S. ambassador’s residence in London, “we loaded onto a small black bus.”
- “We waited and watched as Bolton sped by and left us in the dust. The discussion on the bus quickly moved … to how arrogant and selfish Bolton could be, not just in this moment but on a regular basis.”
That incident resulted in a “a full Irish explosion” from Mick Mulvaney, then chief of staff, who called Bolton a “f***** self-righteous, self-centered son of a b****,” according to Huckabee Sanders. All of that is interesting in an entertainment sense, but not entirely on point. Politics is filled with “self-righteous, self-centered” SOBs, but generally speaking, we evaluate them on their policies and performance rather than their personality. That’s also the main flaw in Bolton’s criticisms thus far on the book tour, as Trump’s policies on China, Russia, and Iran eventually came around to the hard lines that Bolton espouses — or at least took them further in that direction than Barack Obama had or Hillary Clinton would have.
At least it’s a better attack than Trump’s offering today:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1275044483047055366
“I hired a wacko” is not the slam-dunk argument Trump might think it is. He could have just invited Bolton to the White House a few times if all he wanted was to hear a “differing point of view.” Instead, Trump appointed a man much more associated with harder-line neocon policies than even the Bush administration had been comfortable assuming to carry out Trump’s nat-sec policies, despite Trump’s much more populist noninterventionist campaigning. That seemed like a strange decision at the time, and it became clear that it was a bad decision — but that’s on Trump, not Bolton.
It its way, this tweet — along with Trump’s decision to hire Bolton in the first place — tend to validate Bolton’s criticism that Trump’s a capricious and self-centered leader who acts whimsically and reactively rather than from a philosophical core. The routine way in which Trump denigrates his own appointees after (and occasionally before) they leave makes that look more like the rule rather than the exception. If Trump wants to counter Bolton’s argument, perhaps he’d be better off letting Mulvaney and Huckabee Sanders do his talking — and stop talking about personnel decisions on Twitter.
