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President Trump speaks as then-national security adviser
John Bolton listens in the Oval Office on August 20, 2019. (Andrew
Harrer/EPE-EFE/Shutterstock)
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Maybe we didn’t need John Bolton to hammer home the point. Since
the beginning of President Trump’s time in office, analysts and critics
have all noted his apparent venality, his blinkered and transactional approach to diplomacy and his questionable rapport with strongmen and dictators. Trump was impeached
by the House — a process in which Bolton, his former national security
adviser, decided not to participate — precisely for his willingness to
illicitly bend U.S. foreign policy around his own personal interest.
But the revelations in a forthcoming memoir by Bolton, a right-wing hawk with a checkered reputation in Washington, paint a damning
picture of the president. Bolton served in the White House’s top national
security post from March 2018 to September 2019, long enough for him to
witness firsthand Trump’s interactions with Chinese President Xi Jinping
and chronicle some startling exchanges.
According to my colleagues who have read advance copies, Bolton’s book casts Trump as an “erratic” and “stunningly
uninformed” leader, while dishing dirt on those in Trump’s orbit, including
former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The passages that have generated the most headlines this week center on Bolton’s account of Trump’s talks with Xi, in which he
apparently asked the Chinese president to help him win the 2020 election by
boosting agricultural imports from the American heartland, spoke openly of
executing journalists, and — perhaps in the most eye-catching anecdote —
encouraged Xi to carry on the industrial-scale detention of more than a million people from Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in
the far-western region of Xinjiang.
On social media and in news conferences, Trump and the White House
have rejected Bolton’s claims. They
have launched a court case to attempt to stop the book’s release. Bolton
now joins a lengthy list of Trump appointees who have publicly fallen out with the president, in often rather
ugly fashion.
“I don’t think he’s fit for office. I don’t think he has the competence
to carry out the job,” Bolton told ABC News in an interview that’s
scheduled to air in full on Sunday. “There really isn’t any
guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for
Donald Trump’s reelection. I think he was so focused on the reelection that
longer-term considerations fell by the wayside.”
“If these accounts are true, it’s not only morally repugnant, it’s a
violation of Donald Trump’s sacred duty to the American people to protect
America’s interests and defend our values," said Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival in the
presidential race.
China casts a particularly curious shadow here. In recent months,
the White House has seized on widespread antipathy toward China and its initial handling of the coronavirus outbreak as a
signature theme of its reelection strategy. Trump’s allies tout their tough
approach to Beijing — from launching trade wars, to championing the cause
of Hong Kong’s protesters, to pushing legislation that punishes Chinese
officials linked to Xinjiang’s detention camps, which Trump signed Wednesday. They argue that their
predecessors were too permissive of Beijing’s behavior in the past.
In a podcast this week with the conservative American Enterprise
Institute, Pompeo criticized previous U.S. administrations for
not taking the threat posed by China’s military expansionism and economic
opportunism more seriously. “For 20 years, the United States has not
responded to these things in a real way,” he said. “We’ve viewed the 1.5 billion people in the
Chinese market as so important to the American economy and the risk that
the Chinese would respond by closing us out for the favor of some other
nation.”
But the Bolton revelations — plus numerous other documented instances of Trump seeking to ingratiate himself
or acquiesce to Xi — make the anti-China electoral pitch trickier. “If
reality mattered, this would make it extremely hard for Trump to now argue
that he’s tough on China and that Biden is soft,” noted Post columnists Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman.
“Trump has been making this claim in absurdly
lurid ads that laughably rip Biden’s words out of context.”
Biden, too, has adopted a hawkish line on China, a reflection in part of the
extent to which anti-Beijing sentiment has become bipartisan. But his
advisers articulate their China strategy in more subtle terms, calling for “competition without catastrophe” and the bolstering of
alliance systems in Asia that Trump has let fray.
There needs to be “less focus on trying to slow China down and more on
running faster ourselves,” Jake Sullivan, a former senior Obama
administration official and an adviser to Biden said during a Thursday webinar where he and Michèle Flournoy, a
former defense official under Obama, both cited the need for significant
domestic investments at home to help reposition America abroad.
It could be the Chinese view, not that of Bolton, that undermines
Trump most. While Trump likes to say that China is rooting for a Biden
victory, a Bloomberg News investigation published this week
suggested the opposite.
“If Biden is elected, I think this could be more dangerous for China,
because he will work with allies to target China, whereas Trump is destroying
U.S. alliances,” Zhou Xiaoming, a former Chinese trade negotiator, told
Bloomberg. A number of current Chinese officials reportedly echoed this view, recognizing that Trump’s
turbulent unilateralism weakened the U.S.'s hand in its dealings in Asia.
Their regional counterparts may agree. “Several countries in Asia have
concerns about aligning themselves with a U.S. that seems less predictable
and not reliable,” Bonnie Glaser at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies said to the
Financial Times. “If Trump is voted out in [presidential
elections in] November, there will be a sigh of relief across the region.”
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Talking Points
• French President
Emmanuel Macron was in London on Thursday for his first foreign trip since
late February, as Europe begins to reopen borders that were
shuttered to control the coronavirus pandemic. The primary purpose of the visit was to commemorate
the 80th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle’s historic
radio broadcast from London on June 18, 1940, when he sounded the first
call for French resistance to Nazi Germany in World War II. But some of the
pomp was punctured by the need to be mindful of social distancing
guidelines.
• Remember the photo
of the Black Lives Matter protester carrying an injured white man,
suspected of being a far-right demonstrator, to safety in London over the
weekend? Turns out that white man used to be a cop. He
was identified as Bryn Male, 55, a former police officer and detective
constable for the British Transport Police, the
service committed to protect rail passengers from crime.
• Facebook on
Thursday deactivated dozens of ads placed by President Trump’s reelection
campaign that included a symbol once used by the Nazis to
designate political prisoners in concentration camps. Thursday’s action by
Facebook was not the first time the technology
giant has taken action against Trump campaign ads. But generally, the company has taken a light touch,
pledging not to police the veracity of posts by politicians.
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Top of The Post
By
Josh Partlow, Colby Itkowitz and Annie Gowen ● Read more »
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Viewpoints
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Thin air
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A neighbor helps César García carry an oxygen tank home
to his stepson, Mario Solís Rodríguez, who is bedridden with covid-19 in
Lima, Peru. (Rodrigo Abd/AP)
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Mario Solís Rodríguez needed oxygen. His mother had no choice. The creaking public hospitals
were overwhelmed with patients. The government's
coronavirus hotline wasn’t responding to her desperate calls. So Denisse Rodríguez resorted to the
black market.
Scouring Facebook, the 48-year-old housewife found an informal vendor
offering a tank for 4,500 sols — nearly $1,300. The oxygen was of unknown
quality, its price a markup of around 1,000 percent — and a crushing blow
for a family whose principal breadwinner, Rodríguez’s husband, typically
earns less than $50 a day driving a mototaxi, a motorcycle rickshaw, here
in the Peruvian capital. But Solís was gasping for air. Rodríguez borrowed
the money from family and friends.
“What else were we supposed to do?” she asked, tearing up. “Without the oxygen, my son can’t
make it through the night. Even if they took him to hospital, they would
just kill him."
The family’s plight has become typical in Peru, which has reported more
than 237,000 cases of covid-19 and 7,000 deaths. Even before the pandemic
struck, the Andean country’s public health-care system was struggling to
meet the routine needs of its 31 million citizens after decades of
chronic underinvestment. Peru
spends less than $700 on health care per person per year, among the lowest
rates as a share of GDP in Latin America.
Now, the outbreak
has encouraged Peru’s army of forgers — the country is the world’s biggest
producer of counterfeit dollar bills — to flood the market with fake or
low-quality masks and medicines to treat covid-19. — Simeon
Tegel
Read more: In Peru, coronavirus patients who need oxygen resort
to black market and its 1,000 percent markups
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1,000 Words
The Supreme Court ruling Thursday blocking the Trump administration’s
attempt to end the DACA program has spared more than 640,000 young immigrants from
potential deportation, bringing surprise and a deep
sigh of relief for “dreamers” and their families. The 5-4 ruling lifts, for now,
the precarious uncertainty that many immigrant families have lived with
since President Trump attempted to end the Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals program in 2017. (Michael
Reynolds/EPA-EFE)
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Afterword
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Email 
