The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Trump asked, oh, are you a nuclear power?, which I knew was not intended as a joke.

I was doubtful that Trump would raise this particular issue with Putin, involving as it did an issue at a level of specificity Trump had not previously encountered.

This was crazy, in my view: NATO allies were prepared to deny reality because they feared the consequences of admitting it. Did they really believe if they didn’t admit it, it wouldn’t be true?

This painful repetition demonstrates that Trump, who endlessly stresses he is the only one who makes decisions, had trouble taking responsibility for them.

I would have thought I had died and gone to heaven to have had such an orderly approach to preparing for an upcoming day. As it was, Trump generally had only two intelligence briefings per week, and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand.

Trump’s schedule was the easiest anomaly to deal with. One of the hardest was his vindictiveness, as demonstrated by the constant eruptions against John McCain, even after McCain died and could do Trump no more harm.

(The “Ivanka thing” was a flood of stories about Ivanka’s extensive use of her personal e-mail for government business, which the White House was trying to explain was actually quite different from Hillary Clinton’s extensive use of her personal e-mail for government business.)

At most, the internal NSC structure was no more than the quiver of a butterfly’s wings in the tsunami of Trump’s chaos.

Thus, responding to the coronavirus, the NSC biosecurity team functioned exactly as it was supposed to. It was the chair behind the Resolute desk that was empty.

Trump broke in to say, “Even our enemies liked that we didn’t attack.” (No kidding!)