Trump lashes out at 'sick puppy' Bolton for devastating White House memoir
The day after excerpts of John Bolton’s new White House memoir appeared in the press, describing President Trump as “stunningly uninformed” and totally out of his depth in the job he was elected to do, Trump weighed in with his own appraisal of his former national security adviser, whom he had hired with effusive praise in April 2018.
In a series of tweets published over the span of 10 hours, Trump described Bolton as a “Wacko,” a “sick puppy,” a “disgruntled boring fool” and “a dope,” and claimed the book is “made up.”
At the same time, however, the administration is attempting to block publication of the book, asserting that it contains (presumably accurate) classified information.
“Wacko John Bolton’s ‘exceedingly tedious’ (New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories,” the president tweeted at 12:10 a.m. ET. “Said all good about me, in print, until the day I fired him. A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!”
“Bolton’s book, which is getting terrible reviews, is a compilation of lies and made up stories, all intended to make me look bad,” the president wrote in a tweet published shortly after 9 a.m. “Many of the ridiculous statements he attributes to me were never made, pure fiction. Just trying to get even for firing him like the sick puppy he is!”
“When Wacko John Bolton went on Deface the Nation and so stupidly said that he looked at the ‘Libyan Model’ for North Korea, all hell broke out,” the president continued an hour later. “Kim Jong Un, who we were getting along with very well, went ‘ballistic,’ just like his missiles — and rightfully so ... He didn’t want Bolton anywhere near him. Bolton’s dumbest of all statements set us back very badly with North Korea, even now. I asked him, ‘what the hell were you thinking?’ He had no answer and just apologized. That was early on, I should have fired him right then & there!”
The “Libyan Model” referred to a deal struck between NATO countries and Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who agreed to give up his nuclear weapons program and was subsequently deposed and killed.
The book, titled “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” is due to go on sale next week, although reporters from several newspapers obtained early copies this week. The White House filed suit against Bolton earlier this week, and the Justice Department on Wednesday night sought an emergency order from a judge to block the book’s publication.
In a statement, Bolton’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, called the court filing “a frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility.”
“Hundreds of thousands of copies of John Bolton’s ‘The Room Where It Happened’ have already been distributed around the country and the world,” the statement read. “The injunction as requested by the government would accomplish nothing.”
Trump’s moves, however, have helped elevate the memoir’s profile, sending it to the top of bestseller lists nationwide.
Excerpts published Tuesday by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post contained numerous bombshells:
• According to Bolton, Trump asked China’s leader Xi Jinping for help with his reelection.
• Trump told Xi he approved of building concentration camps for China’s Uighur minority.
• Trump spoke of executing U.S. journalists who didn’t reveal sources for stories.
• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other Trump staffers derided the president behind his back.
• Trump was fixated on getting a copy of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” to Kim Jong Un.
• Trump tweeted his defense of the Saudis in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi because he thought it would distract from a story about Ivanka Trump using a private email server.
• Trump did not know that Finland was an independent nation and thought it could be part of Russia.
• The president was unaware that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, White House senior adviser Peter Navarro compared the book to “revenge porn.”
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors are reportedly weighing criminal charges against Bolton for allegedly disclosing classified information. (The Justice Department was in the process of reviewing a manuscript of the book, but Bolton and his publisher accused the government of delaying the review to prevent the book from being published.)
In the book, Bolton asserts that House Democrats botched Trump’s impeachment by focusing on Ukraine, saying they should have expanded their inquiry to what he described as the president’s improper involvement on behalf of authoritarian governments in China and Turkey.
Bolton, though, refused to testify in the House impeachment inquiry against Trump. He offered to testify in the Senate impeachment trial, but Republicans refused to call any witnesses.
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