John Bolton Is The Perfect Washington Man

1. By the end of the nearly five-hundred-page book, Bolton also criticizes Mick Mulvaney, Jared Kushner, the entire White House economic team, many of his foreign counterparts, and, although he shares their misgivings about Donald Trump, the House Democrats who impeached the President.
2. But whatever Bolton's primary approach to compiling notes for this book, relying on recollection and note-taking that never includes a scene where the protagonist/author makes an error is rather unbelievable, even for as perfect a specimen of man as John Bolton.
3. The image is ridiculous of course, but it is not far from the image the real John Bolton paints of himself in the absurdly entertaining pages of his book, the inaptly named The Room Where It Happened.
4. As I wrote at the time he was hired in 2018, Bolton is a deeply odd, thin-skinned, and snarky figure who succeeded in convincing a surprising number of smart people in Washington that he is somehow serious and statesmanlike.
5. Bolton mocks, disparages, or clashes with Steven Mnuchin, Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Mike Pompeo, and others, all within the book’s first hundred pages.
6. Bolton closes the book by (what a twist!) citing himself, with a multi-page quote from a book review he wrote in 2014 for “American Review”, a now-defunct Australian publication.
7. It is obviously quite difficult to write a 500 page book containing detailed quoted conversations spanning a year a half without relying upon any notes, so I am genuinely interested in how Bolton actually did so.
8. Bush, I would not have picked Gates as defense secretary, and had I been Barack Obama, I would not have kept him.” Bolton then proceeded to lambaste Gates’ entire philosophy of service and duty.
9. Bolton is a thin-skinned and snarky figure who succeeded in convincing a surprising number of smart people in Washington that he is somehow serious and statesmanlike.
10. He’s “looking for excuses not to do much of anything” in retaliating against Syrian chemical weapons use; he would “predict gloom and doom when he didn’t get his way” on policy; he used “spite” as a common tactic, prompting Bolton to observe “they didn’t call him ‘Chaos’ for nothing.
11. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/22/john-bolton-is-the-perfect-washington-man/