18 June 2020

That Book

\Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton wrote a tell-all book after an acrimonious departure from the White House and it's due to go on sale next week. Major media outlets have obtained advance copies and published some of the book's most disturbing revelations yesterday.

The best coverage I've seen so far was in the New York Times (link here), the Washington Post (link here), and the Wall Street Journal (link here). (Note all links are paywall-free.)

Here are the three most appalling things revealed by the book:

— Trump told China's president he approved of their using concentration camps to hold at least one million Uighur. "Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do," Bolton wrote.

— Trump begged China's president to help him win the 2020 election. "Trump ... stunningly ... turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win," the book notes.

— Trump promised to end criminal investigations as a favor to foreign dictators. In a meeting with Turkey's Recep Erdoğan, for instance, Trump claimed he could kill an investigation plaguing the dictator underway by federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York. "Trump ... told Erdoğan he would take care of things, explaining that the southern district prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people."

Much, much more can be found in the three linked articles above. Hopefully Trump will badly lose the 2020 election so there would be no need to impeach him again, notwithstanding that the book provides fresh new grounds for doing so.

Needless to say, Trump is attempting to block release of Bolton's book and has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to do so. Given that would almost certainly violate the First Amendment's prohibition against prior restraint, the chance of such litigation prevailing are not good.

More will definitely be published on this topic and very soon. Stay tuned.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Speak up!