Rally (not) around those flags, boys
The other day, driving through a neighborhood in Canonsburg, Washington County, the person I was with – my pickleball partner – commented on the Donald Trump flags fluttering in the breeze in front of several residences.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” she asked.
I admitted I hadn’t.
Truth be told, the banners – which my daughter viewed as going beyond the bounds of election-year enthusiasm to pledges of personal allegiance to Trump – are so numerous throughout western Pennsylvania that they are impossible to miss. “Trump 2020,” they proclaim. Keep America Great.
A few days after this automobile exchange, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times began running stories based on the new book by former Trump administration national security advisor John Bolton.
The book, filled to the brim with Trumpian tales of misconduct, raises the five-year-long-running question: how and why does Trump rate such loyal followers? At this stage of the game?
“The Room Where It Happened” chronicles Bolton’s 17 months In the White House. It is due to be published on Tuesday, though the administration continues to try to prevent its release. The latest attempt at censorship involves the Justice Department.
That horse is already out of the barn, however. Running free and clear, the 470-plus page book already sits atop the Amazon.com bestseller list.
The newspaper excerpts are notorious. Coming as they do from Bolton, a hard-charging, take-no-prisoners, front line foreign policy conservative, they carry a certain weight. There’s a heft and validity to these pages about Trump that no one else has achieved.
Particularly striking was this gem from Bolton, with its unintended allusion to those Trump flags waving in front of the homes of the president’s proud supporters:
“The Trump presidency,” John Bolton tells us, “is not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy. It is grounded in Trump.”
In Bolton’s reckoning, Trump at best comes off as half-formed and half-baked. The president doesn’t know his foreign affairs As, Bs, or Cs. He didn’t know, for example, that the United Kingdom is a nuclear power. He didn’t know that Finland was an independent country and not part of Russia. He evidently doesn’t appreciate that even the smallest of invasions can be costly. He thinks it would be “cool” to take down Venezuela, which, the president said, was “really part of the United States” anyway.
But that’s small stuff. Bolton’s narrative of a presidential encounter with President Xi of China is illuminating, for all the wrong reasons. He writes:
“In their meeting in Osaka on June 29, Xi told Trump that the U.S.-China relationship was the most important in the world. He said that some (unnamed) American political figures were making erroneous judgments by calling for a new cold war with China.
Whether Xi meant to finger the Democrats or some of us sitting on the U.S. side of the table, I don’t know, but Trump immediately assumed that Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility to China among the Democrats. 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.”
Xi went on to say that he wanted to work with the American president for six more years; Trump replied that folks back home were saying that the two-term limitation on presidential tenure should be repealed for him.
“Xi said the U.S. had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.”
Trump tried to kill criminal investigations as favors to dictators, according to Bolton. Bolton writes that Turkish president Recep Erdogan, in a face-to-face encounter with Trump, argued that a Turkish firm under investigation in the U.S. was innocent. “Trump assured Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the … prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people.”
Obstructing justice “was a way of life” with Trump, Bolton says.
As for linking American security aid to Ukraine to that government’s opening a political investigation of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, the House impeachment managers had it right. Trump’s pitch to the Ukrainian president was an explicit quid pro quo, Bolton tells us.
Thus Bolton’s valedictory: “A president may not misuse the national government’s legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest.” In
And: “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.”
Before Trump took office, the renowned historian Stacy Schiff summarized what she saw as candidate Trump’s chief characteristic, his default position: “He is borne back ceaselessly to himself.”
On those Trump banners fluttering proudly on our Southwestern Pennsylvania flag poles, the question four years into this fiasco of a presidency remains: Why?
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.