John Bolton’s book looks like a fairy-tale for Trump haters By Andrea Widburg
The Trump administration has sued to stop John Bolton’s purported “tell-all” from being released next week on the ground that it is filled with classified information that affects national security. That suit hasn’t stopped Bolton’s publisher from leaking the supposed “bombshells” in the book.
Those bombshells will excite Trump haters, but those who support Trump will immediately recognize them as lies, deliberate misinterpretations, and resentment. Expect the activist Democrat media to sing the book’s praises, but that won’t change the outcome of the November election.
The book’s biggest alleged bombshell, which Bolton writes about in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), is his claim that, in June 2019 at the Osaka G20, Trump begged Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him get reelected. According to Bolton, Xi said that America’s relationship with China was important and that it was wrong for some in America to want a Cold War. Trump countered that Democrats were hostile to China and then, says Bolton, the begging started:
Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.
The implication is that, having used Putin to win in 2016 (something that the Mueller Report reluctantly conceded was false), Trump is now using Xi to win in 2020. This contention is ludicrous.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has dedicated himself to ending thirty years of bad trade deals with China, all of which profoundly damaged American workers. There’s no way he would beg Xi for election help or that Xi would grant it. Trump and Xi both know that China has invested way too much money in Biden’s son to prefer Trump over Biden.
Either Bolton is making things up, or he’s so utterly without humor that, if Trump made one of his sarcastic New York-style jokes, Bolton took it literally. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthhizer, who was present at the meeting where Trump allegedly begged Xi for help, emphatically denies the charge:
“Absolutely untrue, never happened. I was there, I have no recollection of that ever happening. I don’t believe it’s true, I don’t believe it ever happened,” Lighthizer testified during a Senate Finance Committee hearing.
[snip]
Lighthizer told Menendez that he was in the meeting in question and that Bolton’s allegation was “completely crazy.”
“Would I have recollected something as crazy as that? Of course I would,” Lighthizer said.
Bolton also claims that Trump “[t]old Chinese President Xi Jinping [he] should go ahead with building camps the regime was constructing for Chinese Uighurs.” Red State exposes just how ridiculous this assertion is:
The claim comes via an anonymous interpreter, shared third hand by Bolton in which it’s said that Xi “basically” described concentration camps. There’s so much being assumed here that it’s almost not worth entertaining.
Who’s the interpreter? Why was this never mentioned by any of Bolton’s staff in their public testimonies? Something like this would have been noteworthy to everyone, right? And what does “basically” mean? That sounds an awful like a word a person uses when something didn’t actually clearly happen but they want to cover their own tail. I mean, “basically” leaves no room for misrepresentation and misinterpretation, right? Where’s the notes from this event? Why not just say what was clearly said instead of “basically?”
But even if we look past all those questions, does anyone seriously believe that a famed denialist and cunning dictator like Xi Jinping would actually tell Trump in the middle of trade negotiations that he’s building concentration camps?
The hilarious thing is that just yesterday, as part of the ordinary course of presidential business, Trump signed a bill that requires his administration to help protect the Uighur Muslims in those concentration camps that Xi supposedly built with Trump’s permission.
At The Conservative Treehouse comes this astute observation about another crazed Bolton observation, this one that Trump was too friendly with dictators:
Bolton’s biggest problem is actually with the Trump doctrine.
[snip]
President Trump’s foreign policy doctrine is executed through the prism of using economics to achieve national security objectives.
This approach was so fundamentally foreign to Bolton that he couldn’t wrap his mind around how trade and economics could be used instead of dropping bombs.
Bolton is a warmonger who was disappointed when his boss wouldn’t go to war. He hopes to get rich badmouthing Trump’s refusal to plunge America into wars by finding an audience among people who have relentlessly insisted that Trump is a warmonger. All of these people are disgraceful — yet we know they’ll still reap profits from this sleazy exercise.
Of course, the best revenge is for ordinary Americans, the ones who see that Trump fights for them every day, to turn out at the polls in record numbers on November 3, giving Trump a victory so overwhelming that the leftists and NeverTrumpers will be politically marginalized for decades to come.
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