Trump Gives ‘Personal Favors’ to Fellow Authoritarians
On This Day In 2020
Trump was seen as a president who paid relatively little attention to human rights violations. His second national security advisor, John Bolton, brought to light a few of those examples which, in ordinary times, might have been seen as highly disconcerting. But with President Trump, these were only the latest in an endless series of revelations when Trump’s closest advisors warned the American People that our country was being governed by a madman. (And, remember, Bolton had worked for three previous Administrations, so he had good bases for comparison.)
OTDI 2020, details of Bolton’s book The Room Where It Happened came out. In one story, Bolton described how Trump apparently endorsed Xi Jinping’s construction of internment camps for Uighurs and other ethnic minorities. Trump also offered “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” such as Turkey’s president Erdogan; we hastily evacuated parts of Syria apparently to allow Erdogan to seize power in the region.
So, he sang the praises of these men. About Erdogan: “He’s tough, but I get along with him. And maybe that’s a bad thing, but I think it’s a really good thing.” About North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un: He “wrote me beautiful letters and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” About Putin: well, there are so many of those.
Apparently Trump thought he could get personal favors in return for being so obsequious. For example, Bolton reports that Trump begged Xi to have China increase purchases of crops from U.S. farmers—Trump believed it would help him win reelection.
That stance, though, was fairly typical of what Bolton saw in the White House: “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn't driven by re-election calculations," he noted.
Yeah, but doesn’t all of this pandering to the world’s worst dictators pay off for the United States? Don’t we get to at least enact some of our policies to Make America Great? Certainly Putin, at least, will do Donald more favors, right? Um, no. As Bolton put it, "I think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle."
So, as Bolton summarizes, behind his back even his other close advisors snicker at him. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for example, wrote that Trump is "full of shit".
In fairness, the BBC noted that Trump has called Bolton, the man he chose to be his top adviser on security matters "incompetent" and a "boring old fool."
Dive Deeper
BBC reports on the 10 biggest claims in Bolton’s book
Chris Cillizza and Brenna Williams chronicled 15 times Trump praised autocrats—and that was just during the first few years of the Trump Administration
You can read even more when you pick up Bolton’s book “The Room Where it Happened” here on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3Htah33