Ambassador John Bolton, who served President Donald Trump as National Security Advisor for 17 months from April 2018 to September 2019, claims in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday that Trump wants to be re-elected in 2020.
The op-ed is titled “The Scandal of Trump’s China Policy,” and is timed to promote Bolton’s forthcoming “tell-all” book about his service, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. The Department of Justice is suing to block publication, citing concerns about classified information.
In the op-ed, Bolton claims that while President Trump broke with the failed Washington assumption that China was not a threat to American interests, he did not succeed in stopping China because he cared about his domestic political fate.
“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” Bolton writes, adding: “The Trump presidency is not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy. It is grounded in Trump.”
He writes:
Trump formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behavior that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency. Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different.
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In today’s pre-2020 election climate, Trump has made a sharp turn to anti-China rhetoric. Frustrated in his search for the big China trade deal, and mortally afraid of the negative political effects of the coronavirus pandemic on his re-election prospects, Trump has now decided to blame China, with ample justification. Whether his actions will match his words remains to be seen. His administration has signaled that Beijing’s suppression of dissent in Hong Kong will have consequences, but no actual consequences have yet been imposed.
Most important of all, will Trump’s current China pose last beyond election day?
Bolton omits the fact that China introduced domestic politics into the trade dispute, specifically targeting vulnerable congressional districts prior to the 2018 midterm elections with tariffs and with propaganda, hoping to gain leverage.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.