The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

We made a weathervane look like the Rock of Gibraltar.

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.

In my government experience, this was the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do. It called to mind Kelly’s question to me: what would happen if we ever got into a real crisis with Trump as President? Well, we now had one, and Trump had behaved bizarrely, just as Kelly had feared.

Trump asked Mulvaney and Kushner what they thought. Mulvaney agreed with me, but Kushner said he would have the meeting because there was nothing to lose. These people had an attention span no longer than the deal in front of them.

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.

In the various commentaries I heard on these subjects, they always seemed intermingled and confused, one reason I did not pay them much heed. Even after they became public, I could barely separate the strands of the multiple conspiracy theories at work.

A President may not misuse the national government’s legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guise of national interest. Had the House not focused solely on the Ukraine aspects of Trump’s confusion of his personal interests (whether political or economic), but on the broader pattern of his behavior—including his pressure campaigns involving Halkbank, ZTE, and Huawei among others—there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that “high crimes and misdemeanors” had been perpetrated.

While liberals and Democrats focus on impeachment, conservatives and Republicans should worry about the removal of the political guardrail of Trump having to face reelection. As this memoir demonstrates, many of Trump’s national security decisions hinged more on political than on philosophy, strategy or foreign policy and defense rationales. More widely, faced with the coronavirus crisis, Trump said, “When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be.”2 He threatened to adjourn Congress, wrongly citing a constitutional provision that has never been used.3 No conservative who has read the Constitution could be anything but astonished at these assertions.