Crank who agreed to work with Donald Trump discovers Donald Trump is unfit to be president

John Bolton has some retrospective advice for the House of Representatives:

John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated President Trump not just for pressuring Ukraine to incriminate his domestic foes but for a variety of instances when he sought to intervene in law enforcement matters for political reasons.

Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr. Bolton writes, adding that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

Mr. Bolton also adds a striking new allegation by saying that Mr. Trump overtly linked trade negotiations to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping of China to buy a lot of American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Mr. Trump, he writes, was “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.”

[…]

Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes. He came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known. Even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock him behind his back. During Mr. Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr. Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, “He is so full of shit.”

A month later, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the president’s North Korea diplomacy, declaring that there was “zero probability of success.”

Some of these new details confirming what we already new about Trump are amusing/horrifying, but it’s pretty rich to lecture the House about what they should have been investigating when you saved them for your profit-taking book rather than testifying. Of course, acknowledging that this is what Trump has always been could also raise uncomfortable questions about why Baker’s employer (and most other major media outlets) treated Hillary Clinton’s compliance with email server management best practices as the most important issue facing the country in 2016.

This is a Speerian level of moral cowardice and self-aggrandizement.— Philip Klinkner (@pklinkne) June 17, 2020

…no Trump University student was a bigger mark than the “Donald the Dove” set:

Bolton attributes a litany of shocking statements to the president. Trump said invading Venezuela would be “cool” and that the South American nation was “really part of the United States.” Bolton says Trump kept confusing the current and former presidents of Afghanistan, while asking Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to help him strike a deal with Iran. And Trump told Xi that Americans were clamoring for him to change constitutional rules to serve more than two terms, according to the book.

[…]

Bolton describes Trump as callously unconcerned about human rights violations. He writes that during an opening dinner of the G-20 meeting in Osaka in 2019 attended only by translators, Xi explained to Trump “why he was basically building concentration camps” in a northwest Chinese province where the Chinese government has been interning Uighurs, an ethnic minority.

According to Bolton, the U.S. interpreter said that Trump spoke approvingly of the camps. Bolton writes that he was told by Matt Pottinger, an NSC official who is hawkish on China, that Trump had something similar during a 2017 trip to China.