Yet Another Former White House Employee Pens a Bestseller

John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor, has a book coming out on Tuesday called The Room Where It Happened. At least it is scheduled to come out then; the Department of Justice is attempting to block its publication. I doubt they will succeed because 200,000 copies have already been distributed to stores, and all the major media outlets have gotten review copies already. Susan Glasser at the New Yorker is one of them. Here is an excerpt of her essay on the book I liked:

Other parts of Bolton’s withering download on Trump are neither criminal nor impeachable, just profoundly depressing. Has there ever been a stupider, more ignorant President? Trump thought Finland was part of Russia. He did not know that Britain is a nuclear power. He told Kelly an invasion of Venezuela would be “cool.” Trump was obsessed with following up on the empty promises of the Singapore nuclear summit by making sure that Kim received a copy of a CD with the Elton John song “Rocket Man” on it that Trump had autographed for him. Bolton portrays Trump as a President single-mindedly consumed with himself and his prospects for reëlection, rather than any policy goals. But if there is one policy takeaway from the book, it is that NATO is in dire trouble if Trump wins a second term. The President’s hostility to the alliance would reappear over and over in private, no matter how many times his advisers thought that they had convinced him of its vital importance. Trump saw Europeans as adversaries, not America’s closest allies, and often, according to Bolton, told advisers different versions of the idea that “the EU is worse than China, only smaller.”