The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

While Trump was ultimately vindicated on collusion, his defensive reaction willfully ignored or denied that Russia was meddling globally in US and many other elections, and public-policy debate more broadly.

And so the Trump transition ended with no visible prospect of my joining the Administration. I rationalized the outcome by concluding that if Trump’s post-inaugural decision-making process (using that word loosely) was as unconventional and erratic as his personnel selections, I was fine staying outside. If only one could say that for the country.

I added only that one should be judged on performance, listing a few of what I considered to be my foreign-policy achievements.

Trump said, “You know, you and I agree on almost everything except Iraq,” and I replied, “Yes, but even there, we agree that Obama’s withdrawal of American forces in 2011 led us to the mess we have there now.” Trump then said, “Not now, but at the right time and for the right position, I’m going to ask you to come into this Administration, and you’re going to agree, right?” I laughed, as did Trump and McMaster (although I felt somewhat uncomfortable on his behalf), and answered, “Sure,” figuring I had again dodged the bullet I had feared. No pressure, no rush, and no amorphous White House job without an inbox.

The most palpable manifestation of the problems was Iran, specifically the 2015 nuclear deal, which Obama considered a crowning achievement (the other being Obamacare). The deal was badly conceived, abominably negotiated and drafted, and entirely advantageous to Iran: unenforceable, unverifiable, and inadequate in duration and scope. Although purportedly resolving the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, the deal did no such thing. In fact, it exacerbated the threat by creating the semblance of a solution, diverting attention from the dangers, and lifting the economic sanctions that had imposed substantial pain on Iran’s economy, while allowing Tehran to proceed essentially unimpeded. Moreover, the deal did not seriously address other threats Iran posed: its ballistic-missile program (a thinly disguised effort to develop delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons); its continuing role as the world’s central banker for international terrorism; and its other malign activity in the region, through the intervention and growing strength of the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s external military arm, in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere.

And McMaster wasn’t doing himself any favors by opposing the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” to describe things like… radical Islamic terrorism.

On March 6, I had yet another meeting with Trump. Waiting in the West Wing lobby, I watched on television as reporters asked why he thought the North was now ready to negotiate, and Trump replied happily, “Me.” I hoped he understood North Korea truly feared that he, unlike Obama, was prepared if necessary to use military force. I went to the Oval at about 4:40, once again sitting in front of the completely clean Resolute desk. Trump said to me, just as Kelly entered, “Did I ask for this meeting or did you?” I said I had, and he responded, “I thought I had, but I’m glad you came in because I wanted to see you.” We started off talking about North Korea, and I explained I thought Kim Jong Un was trying to buy time to finish the relatively few (albeit critical) tasks still necessary to achieve a deliverable nuclear-weapons capability. That meant that Kim Jong Un now especially feared military force; he knew economic sanctions alone wouldn’t prevent him from reaching that goal. I wasn’t quite sure Trump got the point, but I also raised reports of North Korea’s selling chemical-weapons equipment and precursor chemicals to Syria, likely financed by Iran.28 If true, this linkage could be pivotal for both North Korea and Iran, showing just how dangerous Pyongyang was: now selling chemical weapons, soon enough selling nuclear weapons. I urged him to use this argument to justify both exiting the Iran nuclear deal and taking a harder line on North Korea. Kelly agreed and urged me to k...

By early September, attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad and the US consulate in Basra, undoubtedly, in my view, by Shia militia groups acting at Iran’s behest, revealed new tensions within the Administration, as many in State and Defense resisted forceful responses.18 The unwillingness to retaliate, thereby raising the costs to the attackers and hopefully deterring them in the future, reflected the hangover of Obama-era policies. Even twenty months into the Trump presidency, new appointees and new policies were not yet in place. If it were still early 2017, the problem might have been understandable, but it was sheer malpractice that bureaucratic inertia persisted in such critical policy areas. The debate over responding to these sorts of attacks lasted right through my tenure, because of obstructionism and Trump’s impulsive desires to reduce America’s troop presence in the region, leading uniformly in a more passive direction. For all that Trump hated about the Obama Administration, it was no small irony that his own idiosyncratic views simply reinforced the bureaucracy’s existing tendencies, all to the detriment of US interests in the Middle East more broadly. I was also troubled by Treasury’s unwillingness to bear down on Iran’s participation in the global financial messaging system known as SWIFT. There was considerable interest among congressional Republicans in stopping Iran’s continued connection to the system, but Mnuchin and Treasury objected. They had understand...

I told Trump about this North Korean eruption at about six thirty p.m., and he said our press line should be, “Whatever the situation is, is fine with me. If they would prefer to meet, I am ready. If they would prefer not to meet, that is okay with me too. I will fully understand.” I called again at about seven o’clock and listened at length to Trump criticize the South Korean–US military exercise: he had been against it for a year, couldn’t understand why it cost so much and was so provocative, didn’t like flying B-52s from Guam to participate, and on and on and on. I couldn’t believe that the reason for these exercises—to be fully ready for a North Korean attack—hadn’t been explained before. If it had, it clearly hadn’t registered. Competent militaries exercise frequently. Especially in an alliance, joint training is critical so that the allied countries don’t cause problems for themselves in a time of crisis. “Fight tonight” was the slogan of US Forces Korea, reflecting its mission to deter and defeat aggression. A decrease in readiness could mean “fight next month,” which didn’t cut it. As I came to realize, however, Trump just didn’t want to hear about it. The exercises offended Kim Jong Un and were unnecessarily expensive. Case closed.

More seriously, Kim’s chief of staff did not arrive in Singapore as scheduled on May 17. Preparations for the North’s paranoid leader were formidable, even if dwarfed by what it took for a US President to make such a journey. Delay in laying the groundwork could ultimately postpone or even cancel the meeting itself. By Monday, May 21, no North Korean advance team had arrived, hence there were no meetings with our team in Singapore. Trump began to wonder what was up, telling me, “I want to get out [of Singapore] before they do,” which sounded promising. He recounted how with the women he had dated, he never liked to have them break up with him; he always wanted to be the one doing the breaking up. (“Very revealing,” said Kelly when I told him later.)18 One question was whether to cancel Singapore just as Moon Jae-in came to town or wait until he departed. I urged Trump to act now, because doing so after Moon left would seem like an explicit rebuff of Moon, which was unnecessary. Trump agreed, saying, “I may tweet tonight.” At Trump’s request, I spoke with Pence and Kelly, who both agreed he should tweet away. I reported this back to Trump, and Trump started dictating what his tweet might say. After several drafts (suitably retyped by Westerhout), it (or they) emerged as: Based on the fact that dialogue has changed pertaining to North Korea and its denuclearization, I have respectfully asked my representatives to inform North Korea to terminate the June 12th meeting in Singa...

I joined one of the intelligence briefings Trump had every week from Director of National Intelligence Coats, CIA Director Haspel, and briefers who accompanied them. I didn’t think these briefings were terribly useful, and neither did the intelligence community, since much of the time was spent listening to Trump, rather than Trump listening to the briefers. I made several tries to improve the transmission of intelligence to Trump but failed repeatedly.

As McGahn said frequently, this was not the Bush White House.

Once we saw that Kim had left the Oval, Pence and I went in, and Kelly gave me the original and a rough translation of Kim Jong Un’s letter to Trump, saying, “This is the only copy.” The letter was pure puffery, written probably by some clerk in North Korea’s agitprop bureau, but Trump loved it. This was the beginning of the Trump-Kim bromance. The First Family was going to Camp David for the weekend, and they had all assembled to walk to Marine One, which had landed in the interim. Trump smiled and gave me a thumbs-up as he left the Oval again.

The lunch ended shortly thereafter, at twelve thirty, but we were still stuck because the joint statements weren’t ready. Trump and Kim decided to walk in the hotel garden, which produced endlessly rebroadcast television footage but nothing else. Finally, we held the signing ceremony. The North Korean delegation was very impressive. They all clapped in perfect unison, loud and hard, for example whenever Kim said or did something noteworthy, which was quite a contrast with the raggedy performance of the US delegation. Trump did several one-on-one press interviews before the huge media event began shortly after four p.m., when he unexpectedly played our “recruitment” video. The coverage was extraordinary, and then we were off to Washington, my fondest wish, before anything else went wrong. Shortly after Air Force One was airborne, Trump called Moon and then Abe to brief them. (Pompeo stayed in Singapore, traveling on to Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo to provide more-detailed readouts of what had happened.) Trump told Moon that things could not have gone better, and they both spoke glowingly of what was accomplished. Trump asked Moon, a little belatedly, about how to implement the agreement, repeating what he said in the press conference, that he had been up for twenty-seven straight hours, something Kelly and I knew for sure was not true. Moon stressed, as Seoul’s representatives did subsequently in public statements, that Kim had made a clear commitment to denuclearization. Abe ...

Trump still wondered what Xi Jinping was telling Kim Jong Un, and I told him for sure it wasn’t helpful. I gave Trump a one-pager I had drafted entirely on my own speculating on what Xi might be saying, based on my years of involvement in these issues. I hoped it might wake him up or get him thinking; I had tried everything else, so I figured I had nothing to lose. Trump read the “script” but didn’t react to it. At least he had heard what I believed was the real situation. The “transcript” of my version of Xi’s “comments” to Kim is as follows: “Look, Jong Un, you can’t trust Trump no matter how many nice letters he writes. He’s trying to sucker you, like all capitalist salesmen. Don’t fall for it. What Trump really wants is to turn North Korea into South Korea. Trump, Pompeo and Bolton are all the same. They only appear different so they can mess with your head. Americans have short-term minds. They are erratic and inconsistent, and they can’t be trusted. What’s more, Moon Jae-in thinks like they do, except he’s even worse. He’s a pacifist. We can run all over Moon, but the Americans understand power. “That’s why you have to stick with me. It’s the only way for you to keep your nuclear-weapons program, get real financial aid, and hold on to power. If you proceed down this road of negotiations with the Americans, you’re going to be hanging from a tree in Pyongyang before too long, I guarantee it. Stick with me. “All you have to do is keep hiding your nuclear weapons, missil...

Trump’s first bilateral was with Merkel, who said lightly, “We are not yet completely controlled by Russia.”7 She asked about Putin, but Trump ducked, saying he had no agenda. Instead, he wanted to talk yet again about the higher tariffs he was considering applying to US imports of cars and trucks, which would hit Germany hard, complaining, as he did frequently, that Germany’s existing tariffs on US cars were four times higher than our tariffs on theirs. Then it was Macron, whom Trump accused of always leaking their conversations, which Macron denied, smiling broadly. Trump smiled too, looking at Mattis as if to imply he knew whence came the leaks on the US side. Macron wanted to know Trump’s endgame in the trade wars with China and the EU, but Trump said it didn’t matter. For the EU, he thought it would come down to the car and truck tariffs, likely to be 25 percent, and then went off on Jean-Claude Juncker, who, he believed, hated America. Macron still wanted a “broad deal” with Iran, as the two of them had discussed in April, but Trump seemed uninterested. With that, we motorcaded back to downtown Brussels. I gave my seat at the leaders’ dinner to Hutchison that night, as a gesture for what she had been through. Besides, I had had enough, and things seemed to be settling down. Wrong. I left the hotel at seven forty-five Thursday morning to meet with Trump, but he called me in the car first to ask, “Are you ready to play in the big leagues today? This is what I want to s...

For the Brits, ironically, Brussels was the new George III: a remote (politically if not physically), unaccountable, oppressive machine that a majority of British voters rejected in 2016, reversing forty-three years of EU membership. Yet implementing the vote had been disastrously mishandled, thereby threatening political stability in Britain itself. We should have been doing far more to help the Brexiteers, and I certainly tried. Unfortunately, apart from Trump and myself, almost no one in the Administration seemed to care. What a potential tragedy.

Back at the Kalastajatorppa, we had word that Putin’s plane was late departing Moscow, following his pattern of making his guests wait. I hoped Trump would be irritated enough by this that he would be tougher on Putin than otherwise. We did consider canceling the meeting entirely if Putin were late enough, and we decided that in any event, we would make Putin wait for a while in Finland’s presidential palace (where the summit was to be held, as in 1990) once he did arrive. We sweated out a stunningly long, just-under-two-hour one-on-one meeting. Trump emerged at about four fifteen and briefed Kelly, Pompeo, Huntsman, and me. Most of the conversation was on Syria, with particular emphasis on humanitarian assistance and reconstruction (which Russia wanted us and the West generally to fund), and getting Iran out. Trump said Putin spent a lot of time talking, and he listened, which was a switch. In fact, the US interpreter told Fiona Hill and Joe Wang later that Putin had talked for 90 percent of the time (excluding translation); she also said Trump had told her not to take any notes, so she could only debrief us from her unaided memory. It was clear, said Trump, that Putin “wants out” of Syria, and that he liked Netanyahu. Trump also said Putin didn’t seem to care much one way or the other about our leaving the Iran nuclear deal, although he did say Russia would stay in. On China trade issues, Putin commented on the tough US stance, and Trump had replied that he had no choice...

On returning to Washington, I spent the next months preparing for the dramatic step of INF withdrawal. To prevent leaks that would agitate the press and foreign-policy establishment, I thought we should pursue a quiet, low-profile, but expedited approach, rather than endless meetings among staffers who had lived with the INF Treaty their entire government careers and couldn’t bear to see it die. Trump, I believed, was on board, although I was never certain he understood the INF Treaty did not regulate nuclear weapons as such, but only their delivery vehicles. I wanted to launch US withdrawal from the treaty (which would be an important signal to China, among others), or possibly even mutual withdrawal, before my next meeting with Patrushev, in Moscow, in late October. Experience taught me that without action-forcing deadlines, bureaucracies could resist change with incredible tenacity and success. We also needed to prepare our NATO allies for the INF’s demise. Too many European political leaders believed they lived beyond “the end of history” and that nothing external should be allowed to roil their contented continent. It was a nice thought: tell it to Russia and China, not to mention all Europe’s good friends in Iran. An example of the conversations we needed to have took place on October 3 with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. Maas, a Social Democrat, was part of Merkel’s coalition, and doubtless an INF supporter. I didn’t say how far along our thinking was, but I em...

That afternoon, Huntsman and I placed a wreath on a bridge near the Kremlin, less than a hundred yards from St. Basil’s Cathedral, where Boris Nemtsov had been murdered, many believed by Kremlin operatives. We then placed a wreath at Russia’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, along the Kremlin wall, a ceremony I had first attended with Donald Rumsfeld almost exactly eighteen years earlier. My meeting with Putin followed right afterward, beginning precisely the same as the prior meeting, same ornately decorated room, same arrangements, same conference table. Putin was obviously determined to make the point while the media was present that he was unhappy the US had withdrawn from the INF Treaty. He noted that the eagle in the Great Seal of the United States is clutching olive branches in one talon (although he failed to note the eagle is clutching arrows in the other) and asked if the eagle had eaten all the olives. I said I hadn’t brought any new olives with me. So much for Soviet-style banter. Once the press exited, Putin said he had received reports on my earlier meetings and that their side valued our contacts a lot, and that it was always a pleasure to meet with me. We discussed our respective positions on the INF at length, but what really interested Putin was “What comes next?,” meaning what were we contemplating regarding deployment in Europe? Having made the point earlier that Russia and America were effectively the only two countries bound by the INF, I replied that I t...

In addition to objecting to sanctions, Trump stopped an anodyne statement criticizing Russia on the tenth anniversary of its invasion of Georgia, a completely unforced error. Russia would have ignored it, but the Europeans noticed its absence and became even more concerned about American resolve. This was typical of Trump, who in June 2019 also blocked a draft statement on the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres and criticized the State Department for a press release issued before he knew about it. Trump seemed to think that criticizing the policies and actions of foreign governments made it harder for him to have good personal relations with their leaders. This was a reflection of his difficulty in separating personal from official relations. I’m not aware of any case where Russia or China refrained from criticizing the United States for fear of irritating our sensitive leaders.

Trump’s inconsistent views and decisions on Russia made all our work complicated, and cyber and noncyber issues often bled into each other. Moreover, establishing cyber deterrence was easier said than done, since almost all the cyber-offensive operations we wanted to undertake necessarily remained classified. So, those directly affected would know they had been hit, but not necessarily by whom unless we told them. Accordingly, there had to be some public discussion of our capabilities, to put our adversaries on notice that our years of passivity were over and to reassure our friends that America was on the march in cyberspace. In late October, I made public remarks in Washington intended to convey in broad terms what we had done to eviscerate the Obama-era rules.22 Other Administration officials, such as General Nakasone, did the same.23 This was a complicated field of decision, with difficult tradeoffs between what to make public and what to keep classified. The more we could tell, the greater the deterrence we could establish in the minds of publics and decision-makers around the world. But, unfortunately, the more we said publicly, the more we would reveal about capabilities that others could use to improve their own cyber programs, offensive and defensive. This is obviously an area of debate for future Administrations. But whatever Trump’s own personal attitude, we had done substantial work to protect US elections, from Russia and everyone else.

CHAPTER 7 TRUMP HEADS FOR THE DOOR IN SYRIA AND AFGHANISTAN, AND CAN’T FIND IT War by radical Islamist terrorists against the United States began long before 9/11 and will continue long after. You can like it or not, but it is reality. Donald Trump didn’t like it, and acted like it wasn’t true. He opposed “endless wars” in the Middle East but had no coherent plan for what followed withdrawing US forces and effectively abandoning key regional allies as the withdrawal unfolded. Trump liked to say, wrongly, it was all “thousands of miles away.” By contrast, during my time at the White House I tried to operate in reality, with mixed success.

In fact, there was very little progress diplomatically, even as the effects of sanctions and the obvious split with the United States over Brunson and other issues (such as buying Russia’s S-400 air defense system) continued to wreak havoc across Turkey’s economy. Turkey, urgently needing more foreign direct investment, was rapidly moving in the opposite direction, which eventually affected its decision-making. Its judicial system ground its way to yet another hearing on Friday, October 12, in Izmir, where Brunson had been under house arrest since July. With strong indications the court was working toward releasing him, the Defense Department prepared to stage a plane in Germany in case it was needed to retrieve Brunson and his family. Bizarrely, the court convicted Brunson of espionage and related crimes (which was ridiculous), sentenced him to five years in jail, and then decided because of time served and other mitigating factors, he was free to go. This outcome showed that the political fix was in: Erdogan’s claim Brunson was a spy had been “vindicated” for his domestic political purposes, but Brunson went free.7 At 9:35 a.m., I called Trump, who was as usual still in the Residence, and said we were 95 percent certain Brunson was out. Trump was ecstatic, immediately tweeting away, mixed in with a tweet about why Ivanka would be a great UN Ambassador. He wanted Brunson brought immediately to the White House, not stopping at the US medical facility at Landstuhl, Germany,...

That afternoon, I learned that Mattis was in the Oval alone with Trump, and a previously scheduled bill-signing ceremony was running very late. As we were talking, Mattis came out, with Trump right behind him. I could tell instantly something was up. Mattis seemed stunned to see me waiting, but he shook hands without much of an expression. Trump said, “John, come on in,” which I did, with just the two of us in the Oval. “He’s leaving,” said Trump. “I never really liked him.” After the bill-signing ceremony, Trump and I talked for roughly twenty minutes on how to handle the Mattis departure. Trump wanted to put out a tweet before Mattis’s public relations machine got rolling. Mattis had given Trump a long resignation letter explaining why he was leaving, unquestionably written for widespread public distribution, which Trump had not actually read. Instead, he had simply left it on the Resolute desk, from which it had been removed for the bill-signing ceremony. When we retrieved the letter, I read with surprise that Mattis wanted to serve until the end of February, spending his remaining time as Secretary of Defense testifying before Congress and speaking at the February NATO Defense Ministers’ meeting. Even more surprising to Trump, given the tenor of his conversation with Mattis, was the letter’s substance, rejecting Trump’s policies. I explained to Trump that the scheduling was completely untenable, though I was not sure it sank in. He was, however, more and more expressiv...

Dunford did a good job defending himself, and with minimal interference-running by me, because I thought it was better to let Trump hear it from someone else for a change. Others in the room (Pence, Shanahan, Coats, Haspel, Mnuchin, Sullivan, and more) largely remained silent. This was the longest conversation between Dunford and Trump I had seen, the first one without Mattis present. Dunford handled himself well, and I wondered how different things might have been if Mattis hadn’t acted like a “five-star general,” commanding all the four-star generals, but a real Secretary of Defense, running the entire, vast Pentagon machinery. Watching Dunford perform, it occurred to me there was a hidden wisdom in the statutory prohibition against former general officers becoming Secretary of Defense. It was not fear of a military takeover, but, ironically, that neither the civilian nor the military side of the Pentagon’s leadership performed so well when both were military. The Secretary’s broader, inevitably political role ill suited someone with a military background, leaving Mattis just to supervise Dunford and the other Joint Chiefs, who really didn’t need more military supervision. It also underscored how unpersuasive Mattis was in meetings in either the Sit Room or the Oval. He may have established a reputation as a warrior-scholar for carrying with him on the battlefield a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, but he was no debater. All these negotiations about our role in Syr...

The argument I pressed again and again, regarding all the “endless wars,” was that we hadn’t started the wars and couldn’t end them just by our own say-so. Across the Islamic world, the radical philosophies that had caused so much death and destruction were ideological, political as well as religious. Just as religious fervor had driven human conflicts for millennia, so it was driving this one, against America and the West more broadly. It wasn’t going away because we were tired of it, or because we found it inconvenient to balancing our budget. Most important of all, this wasn’t a war about making Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or any other country nicer, safer places to live. I am not a nation builder. I do not believe what is, after all, an essentially Marxist analysis that a better economic way of life will divert people from terrorism. This was about keeping America safe from another 9/11, or even worse, a 9/11 where the terrorists had nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. As long as the threat existed, no place was too far away to worry about. The terrorists weren’t coming to America on wooden sailing ships. By the time I arrived, this debate had been through many iterations, so I did not face a clean slate. My first involvement was May 10, 2018 (later in the day after the post-midnight return of the hostages from Korea), when Zalmay Khalilzad, a friend I had known since the Bush 41 Administration, who had succeeded me as Ambassador to the UN in 2007, came to visit. “...

Predictably, Mattis ran right into his favorite wall, lauding the efforts of other NATO members. “We pay for NATO,” said Trump. “ISIS is still in Afghanistan,” said Mattis. Trump said, “Let Russia take care of them. We’re seven thousand miles away but we’re still the target, they’ll come to our shores, that’s what they all say,” said Trump, scoffing. “It’s a horror show. At some point, we’ve got to get out.” Coats offered that Afghanistan was a border-security issue for America, but Trump wasn’t listening. “We’ll never get out. This was done by a stupid person named George Bush,” he said, to me. “Millions of people killed, trillions of dollars, and we just can’t do it. Another six months, that’s what they said before, and we’re still getting our asses kicked.” Then he launched into a favorite story, about how we helicoptered schoolteachers every day to their school because it was too dangerous for them to go on their own: “Costs a fortune. The IG was right,” he said, veering off into a report about the construction of “a billion-dollar Holiday Inn” and saying, “This is incompetence on our part. They hate us and they shoot us in the back, blew the back of the guy’s head off, arms and legs and things [referring to a recent “green-on-blue” attack where a Utah National Guardsman was killed].31 India builds a library and advertises it all over.” On it went. “We’ve got to get out. My campaign was to get out. People are angry. The base wants out. My people are very smart, it’s wh...

“What’s a win in Afghanistan?” Trump asked. Mattis correctly responded, “The United States doesn’t get attacked.” Finally switching his tack, Mattis offered, “Let’s say we’re ending the war, not that we’re withdrawing.” “Okay, you ready?” Trump asked no one in particular, but using this favorite phrase indicating something big was coming. “Say we have been there for eighteen years. We did a great job. If anybody comes here, they will be met like never before. That’s what we say,” he said, although Trump then expanded the withdrawal to include Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Then Trump came back at Mattis: “I gave you what you asked for. Unlimited authority, no holds barred. You’re losing. You’re getting your ass kicked. You failed.” This painful repetition demonstrates that Trump, who endlessly stresses he is the only one who makes decisions, had trouble taking responsibility for them. “Can we delay it [the withdrawal] so we don’t lose more men and diplomats?” Mattis asked. Trump roared back, “We can’t afford it. We’ve failed. If it were turning out differently, I wouldn’t do it.”

I could see his resignation coming, so I asked, “But what is the alternative if you resign?” Kelly said, “What if we have a real crisis like 9/11 with the way he makes decisions?” I asked, “Do you think it will be better if you leave? At least wait until after the election. If you resign now, the whole election could go bad.” “Maybe it would be better that way,” he answered bitterly, so I said, “Whatever you do will be honorable, but there’s nothing positive about the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders having more authority.” He answered, “I’m going out to Arlington,” presumably to visit his son’s grave, which he did at serious times. We knew this because it happened so often. I left the Roosevelt Room for Kelly’s office, where Pompeo was still waiting before going out to speak to the press about Khashoggi. After his press gaggle, we spoke in my office about what to do, Kelly having left. It was grim. “Mattis is always overseas,” Pompeo said, “the VP is in Mississippi talking about religious freedom, and the only thing Mnuchin thinks about is covering his ass. This will just leave you and me,” worrying that Kelly could go at any time. “If he [Trump] wants to know who the real warriors are, just look around [meaning us]. And Kelly is part of that.” I agreed. Realizing how bad it all sounded, Pompeo said, “This whole thing could end up being the Donald, Ivanka, and Jared show!” In the midst of all this, in the early afternoon, I showed Trump my one-page immigration...

Personnel management issues, also critical to policy development, portended a series of dramatic changes following the November 2018 congressional elections. Jim Mattis and his staff, for example, had a masterful command of press relations, carefully cultivating his reputation as a “warrior scholar.” One story I was sure the media hadn’t heard from Mattis was one told by Trump on May 25, as Marine One flew back to the White House from Annapolis after Trump’s graduation speech to the Naval Academy. He said Mattis had told him, regarding Trump’s appearing in a scheduled presidential debate with Clinton just days after the Access Hollywood story broke in the press, that “it was the bravest thing he had ever seen anyone do.” Coming from a career military man, that was indeed something. Of course, Trump could have been making it up, but, if not, it showed Mattis knew how to flatter with the best of them. There was no doubt Mattis was in troubled waters by the summer of 2018, and he grew steadily weaker as the year unfolded. At about nine forty-five p.m. on Sunday, September 16, Trump called me to ask if I had seen a prominently displayed New York Times article about Mattis3 and “read it carefully,” which I said I had. “I don’t like it,” said Trump. “Mattis is always doing this kind of thing.” I said I thought the article was very unfair to Deputy National Security Advisor Mira Ricardel, brought on by the enmity she had earned from Mattis in her early days at the White House, wh...

Nonetheless, I worried our own government was not displaying a proper sense of urgency. There was, across the government, an obstructionist, “not invented here” mentality, undoubtedly in large part because under eight years of Obama, the Venezuelan, Cuban, and Nicaraguan regimes were not seen as US adversaries. Little or no attention was given to what the US should do if, inconveniently, the people of these countries decided they wanted to run their own governments. Even more important, in my view, the growing Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Cuban influence across the hemisphere had not been a priority. In effect, therefore, the Trump Administration faced an avalanche of due bills in Latin America with no preparation for how to handle them.

Buoyed by Guaidó’s successful return, I was prepared to do the most we could to increase pressure on Maduro, starting with imposing sanctions on the entire government and taking more steps against the banking sector, all of which we should have done in January, but which we ultimately put in place. At a Principals Committee to discuss our plans, Mnuchin was resistant, but he was overwhelmed by others, with Perry politely explaining to him how oil and gas markets actually worked internationally, Kudlow and Ross disputing his economic analysis, and even Kirstjen Nielsen chiming in for stricter sanctions. Pompeo was largely silent. I said, again, we had only two choices in Venezuela: win and lose. Using an analogy from the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis, I said we had Maduro by the windpipe and needed to constrict it, which made Mnuchin start visibly. He was worried that steps in the banking sector would hurt Visa and Mastercard, which he wanted to keep alive for “the day after.”39 I said, as did Perry and Kudlow, there wouldn’t be any “day after” unless we increased pressure dramatically, the sooner the better. This wasn’t some academic exercise. As for Mnuchin’s concern for the harm we would cause the Venezuelan people, I pointed out that Maduro had already killed over forty during this round of Opposition activity, and hundreds of thousands risked their lives every time they went into the streets to protest.40 They weren’t thinking about Visa and Mastercard! The poorest people did...

We were simultaneously squeezing Havana. State reversed Obama’s absurd conclusion that Cuban baseball was somehow independent of its government, thus in turn allowing Treasury to revoke the license allowing Major League Baseball to traffic in Cuban players. This action didn’t endear us to the owners, but they were sadly mistaken if they didn’t grasp that their participation in professional baseball’s scheme meant they were sleeping with the enemy. Even better, the perennial presidential waivers of key provisions of the Helms-Burton Act were coming to an end. Helms-Burton allowed property owners with assets expropriated by Castro’s government and sold to others, to sue in US courts, either to retrieve the property or to receive compensation from the new owners, but those provisions had never been deployed. Now they would be. Consistent with his public threats of a “full and complete embargo” on Cuba because of the oil shipments between Venezuela and Cuba, Trump also repeatedly asked the Defense Department for concrete options on how to stop such shipments, including interdiction.44 Although military force inside Venezuela was a nonstarter, using force to slice Cuba’s oil lifeline could have been dramatic. The Pentagon did nothing. How bad was Cuba’s influence in Venezuela? Even the New York Times understood the problem, running a major story on March 17 recounting how Cuban “medical assistance” had been used to shore up Maduro’s support among Venezuela’s poor and held back ...

The most unexpected outcome of the meeting was Trump’s perception that Rosales had not worn a wedding ring and how young she looked. The second point was true, although she seemed as resolute as they come, but the first I hadn’t noticed. Later, when Guaidó’s name came up, Trump would comment on the wedding ring “issue.” I never did understand what it signified, but it was not good, in Trump’s mind. He thought Guaidó was “weak,” as opposed to Maduro, who was “strong.” By spring, Trump was calling Guaidó the “Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela,” hardly the sort of compliment an ally of the United States should expect. It was far from helpful but typical of how Trump carelessly defamed those around him, as when he began blaming me for the opposition’s failure to overthrow Maduro. Perhaps Trump forgot he made the actual decision on policy, except when he said he was the only one who made decisions. Still, at the moment with Fabiana Rosales, Trump’s performance in the Oval was the most emphatic he had given to date on Venezuela. Too bad the relevant Treasury and State Department subordinates hadn’t also been there to see it.

On April 17, at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida, I spoke to the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association commemoration of the anniversary of their invasion of Cuba fifty-eight years before, in a failed effort to overthrow the Castro regime. The Brigade 2506 vets were a potent force in Cuban-American politics in Florida and around the country, and this yearly gathering was a big attention getter, something aspiring politicians never missed if at all possible. I was able to bring them news, at long last, of the end of the waivers of Helms-Burton title 2, thus allowing suits against the owners of property expropriated by the Castro regime, and the full enforcement of title 4, which could deny them visas to the US, a major problem for foreign corporations that now owned much of that property. There were a number of other noteworthy measures we were announcing against both Cuba and Venezuela, especially those targeting Venezuela’s Central Bank. The overall impact was to show how resolved the Administration was against the “troika of tyranny,” even though I was the only one in the packed Biltmore ballroom who knew how little resolve there was behind the Resolute desk.

The idea that a minor bureaucratic restructuring could have made any difference in the time of Trump reflected how immune bureaucratic pettifoggery is to reality. At most, the internal NSC structure was no more than the quiver of a butterfly’s wings in the tsunami of Trump’s chaos. Even so, and despite the indifference at the top of the White House, the cognizant NSC staffers did their duty in the coronavirus pandemic. As the New York Times reported in a historical review in mid-April: The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.40 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. And fundamentally, after all the human and economic costs of the coronavirus are reckoned, there are two chilling conclusions. First, we must do everything possible to ensure that China, and its contemporaneous disinformation campaign about the origin of the virus, will not succeed in proving that the Big Lie technique is alive and well in the twenty-first century. We must tell the truth about China’s behavior, which Trump was consistently loath to do, or we will suffer the consequences and the...

Trump seemed consumed by the coming testimony in Washington of Michael Cohen, one of his former lawyers, a rare occasion when I saw his personal problems bleed into national security.

I felt sick that a stray tweet could actually result in a meeting, although I took some solace from believing that what motivated Trump was the press coverage and photo op of this unprecedented DMZ get-together, not anything substantive. Trump had wanted to have one of the earlier summits at the DMZ, but that idea had been short-circuited because it gave Kim Jong Un the home-court advantage (whereas we would fly halfway around the world), and because we still hadn’t figured out how to ensure it was just a Trump-Kim bilateral meeting. Now it was going to happen. North Korea had what it wanted from the United States and Trump had what he wanted personally. This showed the asymmetry of Trump’s view of foreign affairs. He couldn’t tell the difference between his personal interests and the country’s interests.

Rand Paul, by this time, was working to have Zarif come from New York to Washington to meet with Trump,64 as North Korea’s Kim Yong Chol had done the year before. Just in case, I prepared at home a typed copy of my two-sentence resignation letter, handwritten in June, to bring in at a moment’s notice. I was ready.

Dunford further explained the need to maintain a counterterrorism presence for the broader region. As he launched into his charts and slides to show how our ongoing Afghan operations would be staffed and costed, Trump said, “There are still a lot of people there,” but fortunately he went on to say, “Having no one is dangerous, because they [the terrorists] tend to form there and knock down buildings,” which was exactly the point. Trump repeated one of his hobbyhorses, namely that it was cheaper to rebuild the World Trade Center than to fight in Afghanistan, inconveniently ignoring the loss of life in the 9/11 attacks, not just the cost of rebuilding. It also ignored the reality that a Trump withdrawal, followed by a terrorist attack, would be devastating politically. Dunford pressed on, saying our military pressure kept the terrorists from reconstituting and was like an insurance policy. He had no precise timetable in mind, but the Pentagon would allow the diplomatic reconciliation process to set the timing. I thought we were approaching dangerous ground here, again opening the question of whether we should be in Afghanistan at all. The discussion meandered around for a while, with Trump asking me why we were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan but not Venezuela, which at least showed everyone else in the room what he really wanted to do.

The meeting began shortly after three p.m., with Pompeo saying, “We are not quite done with the Taliban,” but then laying out the broad terms of a deal that sounded almost done. This description contrasted sharply with what Pompeo had said to me on the phone earlier that day. Trump asked questions, especially about one provision for an exchange of prisoners and hostages between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which in numerical terms looked a lot more favorable to the Taliban than to us. Trump didn’t like that at all. Then Trump began riffing about Afghan President Ghani and his elaborate house in Dubai, which we knew from actual research Ghani didn’t own. But no matter, because Pompeo pointed out the reality that Ghani was now President and controlled the government’s armed forces. Completely predictably, Trump asked, “Who pays them?” Esper, new to this movie script, promptly responded, “We do,” thereby launching Trump into the riff about how Mattis always said, “These soldiers are fighting bravely for their country,” until Trump asked who paid for them, and found out the total cost (including equipment and other supplies) was about $6.5 billion annually. “They are the most highly paid soldiers in the world,” Trump concluded. Then he was off on “green-on-blue” attacks, where Afghan government soldiers attacked US forces: “We teach them how to shoot, and then they take the weapons and say, ‘Oh, thank you, sir,’ and then kill our guys.” Then we were off to the Afghan...

The conversation continued, but I sensed Trump was increasingly distant from it. Something was bothering him, but I couldn’t tell what. Suddenly, off to the races again: “I want to get out of everything,” he said, criticizing our military programs in Africa, as Esper and Dunford hastened to assure him they were already being reduced. Then it was back to the 2018 NATO summit and how he threatened to withdraw (which was not quite true), and how much we spent in Ukraine. Then he again recounted his first conversation with Angela Merkel, and how even before congratulating him for winning, Merkel had asked what he was going to do about Ukraine. Trump had replied by asking Merkel what she was going to do about Ukraine.5 Then he asked, “Do we really want Fort Trump [in Poland]?” I said he had agreed to it in several conversations with Polish President Andrzej Duda, that the Poles were paying for its construction, and that he was going to Poland on September 1 to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Nazi invasion, which didn’t slow him down. He said he didn’t remember agreeing to Fort Trump, which reflected on either his memory or his ability to disregard whatever he didn’t want to remember. Esper tried to explain that troops in Poland would be rotational rather than permanent, but Trump was off to his next point, the ongoing war games in South Korea. “You shouldn’t have let them go on,” he said to me, notwithstanding that he had agreed to them, knowing they were tabletop ...

Ukraine seems an unlikely place as a battleground to imperil an American presidency, but that is exactly what happened in 2019, exploding literally just days after I resigned. My timing couldn’t have been better. Not only was I a participant in and witness to much of the debacle as it unfolded, but I also seemed poised, for good or ill, to figure in only the fourth serious effort in American history to impeach a President. Throughout my West Wing tenure, Trump wanted to do what he wanted to do, based on what he knew and what he saw as his own best personal interests. And in Ukraine, he seemed finally able to have it all. Ukraine is under intense Russian political and economic pressure. In 2014, Moscow orchestrated the illegitimate annexation of Crimea after intervening militarily, the first change in European borders due to military force since 1945. Russian troops remained deployed across the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, supporting and in fact directing separatist forces there. This major Russian-American dispute proves that failing to act earlier to bring Ukraine into NATO left this large, critically important country vulnerable to Putin’s effort to reestablish Russian hegemony within the space of the former Soviet Union. At NATO’s April 2008 Bucharest Summit, the Bush 43 Administration tried to put Georgia and Ukraine on a path to NATO membership, which the Europeans, especially Germany and France, opposed. The tragic consequences were made plain that August, when ...

After the meeting, Poroshenko took me to another room for a one-on-one, where he asked the US to endorse his reelection campaign. He also asked for a number of things that I addressed, allowing me to slide past the endorsement request without being too rude when I said no. What Poroshenko really wanted was for America to sanction Igor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch backing Yulia Tymoshenko, who was, at least at this point, Poroshenko’s main competition in the 2019 elections. Although it didn’t come up in this conversation, Kolomoisky was also backing Volodymyr Zelensky, then leading the polls but not regarded as serious, because, after all, he was just an actor… (For liberal readers, that’s a joke. Ronald Reagan, one of America’s greatest Presidents, was also an actor.) I told Poroshenko if he had evidence on Kolomoisky, he should send it to the Justice Department. I filled Yovanovitch in on this conversation as we rode to the next event, a press conference with Ukrainian media.

These were, to me, the key remarks in the July 25 call that later raised so much attention, deservedly so, whether impeachable, criminal, or otherwise. When, in 1992, Bush 41 supporters suggested he ask foreign governments to help out in his failing campaign against Bill Clinton, Bush and Jim Baker completely rejected the idea.13 Trump did the precise opposite.

By then, I was a private citizen. At about two fifteen p.m. on Monday, September 9, Trump called me down to the Oval, where we met alone. He complained about press coverage on Afghanistan and the cancellation of the Camp David meeting with the Taliban, not to mention the overwhelmingly negative reaction, certainly among Republicans, both to the deal and the invitation of Taliban to Camp David. Of course, most of the negative reaction he had brought on himself by his ill-advised tweets. Perhaps surprisingly, nothing had leaked before the tweets, but they blew the lid off the story. He was furious he was being portrayed as a fool, not that he put it that way. He said, “A lot of people don’t like you. They say you’re a leaker and not a team player.” I wasn’t about to let that go. I said I’d been subject to a campaign of negative leaks against me over the past several months, which I would be happy to describe in detail, and I’d also be happy to tell him who I thought the leaks were coming from. (Mostly, I believed the leaks were being directed by Pompeo and Mulvaney.) As for the claim I was a leaker, I urged him to look for all the favorable stories about me in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, which often revealed who was doing the leaking, and he would find none. Trump asked specifically about the meeting with the Taliban, and I reminded him I had said merely the Taliban should go through a powerful magnetometer. What I had said was that I wouldn’t hav...

Any number of commentators have observed that the government’s pre-clearance review process is riddled with constitutional deficiencies; the potential for obstruction, censorship, and abuse; and harmful to timely debate on critical public policy issues. You can add my name to the list of critics, especially when the process is in the hands of a President so averse to criticism that the idea of banning books comes to him naturally and serenely. There is one other point worth addressing, not related to the clearance process but to the idea of writing a book like this immediately after leaving government service. A number of critics, having of course not read the book, denounced it as a tell-all that was unseemly at best, and, in the words of Trump himself, traitorous. I addressed precisely these issues in 2014, in writing a review of Robert Gates’s memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,8 addressing criticisms of Gates similar to those now directed at me: “Gates’s critics have made two basic points, one political, one ethical. First, they say, it was inappropriate for him to write about an administration still in office, with the Afghanistan war (a major aspect of the book) still under way, and, more amusingly, with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ramping up her expected 2016 presidential campaign. “Second, they argue that Gates betrayed the trust of President Obama and other senior Defense and Administration colleagues by revealing their conversations, positi...

“But the executive-privilege analogy is only superficially accurate. All histories pose a threat to executive privilege, and insiders have been leaking internal administration battles since Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson propagandized against each other through partisan newspapers. Somehow, President Washington muddled through. Moreover, executive privilege’s true justification is to defend against an intrusive congress or judiciary, and its rationale is therefore different from the normal human expectation that confidences do not last forever. Except in the case of classified information, not at issue here, adults in US politics today understand that they are always on stage. There is no rule of omertà in politics, except perhaps in Chicago.” I stand by these views still today.