The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

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 ...