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The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton review – a monument to his own grandiosity

The inevitable fallout between the president and his national security adviser makes for a punchy but self-aggrandising memoir

Any hairdresser could have told them it wouldn’t work. Trump initially refused to hire John Bolton because he disliked his moustache. That walrus brush, which looks like a grizzled version of the cow-catching guard rails on an ancient locomotive, annoyed the elderly combed-over dandy. Trump’s spun-sugar plumage starts behind one of his ears, circles round his scalp, hardens under a toxic rain of spray, then tapers into a jaunty duck tail above his collar: did he envy a man who brandished such stiff bristles on his upper lip? But the Fox News sex pest Roger Ailes recommended Bolton as “a bomb thrower”, so Trump, avid for explosions, made him national security adviser.

They resolved to play good cop and bad cop, although the partnership turned out to be more like bad cop and worse cop. After a mere 18 months it fell apart. Bolton says he resigned, Trump claims to have fired him; I’m content to contemplate what nuclear theorists would call their mutually assured destruction. Now Bolton declares Trump unfit for office and accuses him of appeasing foreign despots in return for an electoral leg-up, smiling on Chinese concentration camps for Muslims and wanting American journalists executed. Trump, incapable of answering the charges, has instead defamed Bolton as a “wacko” and a “sick puppy”. In American parlance, the first means that he’s mad and should be locked up, the second that he’s disgusting and ought to be put down. Politics is the continuation of warfare by other means; it also prolongs into adulthood the name-calling of schoolboys in the playground. Yes, such superannuated adolescents hold the world’s fate in their bunched fists.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3dEOKTD
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