John Bolton says Trump views Chinese politics entirely through re-election goal
Former national security adviser John Bolton writes in a new book that President Donald Trump has asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help him win his re-election by buying more American agricultural products, according to an extract published by the Wall Street Journal.
The disclosure is part of a devastating description of Trump’s foreign policy conduct by Bolton, the most senior White House official to date, to publish an account of his experience. The book is set to further add to Trump’s already difficult effort to secure a second term.
In the book, which is expected to be released next week, Bolton describes a discussion between Trump and Xi at last year’s Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan. Bolton writes that Trump “craves Xi to make sure he wins”, but said he could not print the president’s exact words due to the government’s pre-publication review process for classified documents forbidden, according to the extract.
The former top security official said the result was emblematic of “the confluence in Trump’s mind of his own political interests and the national interests of the United States”, writing that he regularly made policy choices foreign country in order to benefit from its political advantages.
“I have trouble identifying any important Trump decision during my tenure in the White House that was not motivated by re-election calculations,” writes Bolton.
The Trump administration tried to stop publishing the book and asked a federal judge in Washington on Wednesday to grant a restraining order. But the New York Times and the Washington Post both released reports on Bolton’s book on Wednesday after obtaining copies.
Trump told the Wall Street Journal earlier that Bolton was “a liar” and offered a justification for his foreign policy.
In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News on Wednesday evening, Trump said that Bolton “very simply broke the law. As far as it is going to be broken.” He depreciated Bolton as a “washed up guy” when he joined the administration.
Trump told the Wall Street Journal earlier that Bolton was “a liar” and offered a justification for his foreign policy.
Trump campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh said in a Bloomberg Television interview that Bolton’s allegation that Trump had asked for Xi’s intervention in his re-election is “preposterous.”
“John Bolton is just trying to sell books, that’s all there is,” he said.
But the White House is already struggling to systematically refute Bolton’s account. While Trump said on Monday that “maybe he was not telling the truth”, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Wednesday that the book was “full of classified information” without denying Bolton’s claims.
Re-election lens
Bolton says Trump views Chinese politics entirely through the lens of his re-election, determined to strike a trade deal at the expense of almost everything else. This, according to Bolton, raises the possibility that Trump’s recent harsh speeches about China’s role in the coronavirus pandemic are nothing more than bluster which can dissolve if it wins re-election.
“The Trump presidency is not based on philosophy, grand strategy or politics,” writes Bolton. “It is based on Trump. It is something to think about for those, especially the Chinese realists, who think they know what he will do in a second term.”
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said it was “absolutely untrue” that Trump asked Xi to help him with the 2020 U.S. elections during trade negotiations in Japan last year. Lighthizer made the statement during testimony to the Senate on Wednesday.
Bolton writes that last year Trump proposed to drop the criminal charges against Huawei Technology Companies Ltd. if that would help to conclude a phase 1 trade agreement with China.
Bolton also said that Trump had not studied the significant issues facing the country and that he knew little about the other nations with which he was dealing. For example, Bolton writes that the president asked if Finland is part of Russia and expressed surprise when he heard that the United Kingdom is a nuclear power, according to the Washington Post.
The lack of knowledge has put the president at a disadvantage vis-à-vis leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bolton said in an interview with ABC News.
“I think Putin thinks he can play it like a violin. I think Putin is smart, tough. I think he sees that he is not bothered by a serious opponent here. I don’t think that “He’s worried about Donald Trump,” said Bolton in a clip released on Wednesday.
The book, titled “The Room Where It Happened,” could have lasting consequences for Trump’s campaign, which has already been troubled by the president’s response to national protests against police brutality and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump follows his alleged opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, in national polls and in many major swing polls.
“If these stories are true, it is not only morally repugnant, it is a violation of Donald Trump’s sacred duty to the American people to protect the interests of America and defend our values,” said Biden in a press release on Wednesday.
On Wednesday evening, in seeking the emergency prohibition order, the government argued that the book contained classified information and that Bolton had not obtained approval to publish it.
John Bolton also said that Trump had not studied the important problems facing the country and that he knew little about the other nations with which he was dealing.
The injunction should “order its publisher to take all available measures to recover and destroy any copies of the book that may be in the possession of a third party,” the government said in court documents.
The Justice Ministry filed a lawsuit Monday to block the publication.
Legal feuds, combined with Trump’s fierce criticism of Bolton, sparked interest in the book, which became the number one bestseller on Amazon.com before it was published. Many former Trump collaborators have published accounts of their stay at the White House, but none have held positions as high as Bolton.
At the very least, the book could undermine the Trump campaign argument that the president is much harder on China than Biden would be if he were elected. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. used the hashtag #BejingBiden in the tweets and accused the Democratic candidate of not recognizing the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Chinese concessions
The list of Trump’s concessions to China is long, according to Bolton. He was not interested in supporting the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong last year and told Xi in the summer of 2019 that the construction of camps in the Xinjiang region to imprison hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims was “exactly the right thing to do”.
Trump, in the Wall Street Journal interview, said he had not approved Xi’s plan for the widespread detentions in Xinjiang. And in the interview with Hannity, the president said, “No one has been hard on China and no one has been hard on Russia like me. And it’s in the record books and it’s not not even close. The last administration did nothing either. “
The description of Trump’s policies in Bolton’s book will lend credence to Democrats’ claims that the President’s actions have essentially given the green light to China to carry out some of its most egregious abuses, including its crackdown on the Uighurs and his decision to impose a new national security law on Hong Kong.
The White House announced Wednesday that Trump had signed a bill reprimanding the Beijing government for its treatment of Uighurs a few minutes after the extracts from the book were published.
Defending Taiwan, according to Bolton, is also not a priority for the president. He describes Trump as being deferential and at times downright obsequious to Xi, at one point calling him the greatest Chinese leader in 300 years – and then amending him to “the greatest leader in Chinese history.”
The revelations came out around the exact time that Secretary of State Michael Pompeo met with China’s top foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi, for secret talks at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. So far, the two sides have refused to discuss the agenda for the talks.
Bolton argues House Democrats could have extended their dismissal investigation beyond Ukraine to focus on what the former security adviser called “a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behavior that has eroded legitimacy even of the presidency. “
But Bolton was also faced with negative reactions from his critics for his refusal to testify as part of the Chamber’s removal investigation. He said he wanted to wait to see if a judge would decide if he could testify despite objections from the White House.
He offered to testify at the Senate trial on the removal of Trump. The Republicans who control the house voted not to hear from him before acquitting the president.
The New York Times reported that Bolton also wrote that Trump had said he was willing to stop US criminal investigations “to, in fact, give personal favors to the dictators he loved”, citing cases involving the Chinese ZTE Corp. and the Turkish Halkbank. Bolton writes that the president sought to seek favor from Xi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan through the offers.
“The model looked like an obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we could not accept,” writes Bolton, according to the Times, adding that he expressed his concern directly to Attorney General William Barr and the White House lawyer Pat Cipollone.
Bloomberg News reported last October that Erdogan had made several calls to Trump to avoid charges against Halkbank, one of Turkey’s largest lenders. Trump instructed Barr and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to look into the matter after an April phone conversation with Erdogan.
No action was taken for months after the appeal, but US prosecutors released an undated indictment in October accusing the bank of fraud, money laundering and violation of US sanctions against the Iran.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
