Former national security adviser John Bolton, author of “The Room Where It Happened,” refused to come forward to testify before Congress that President Trump betrayed his oath by, among other things, allegedly seeking help from China to help his reelection. In Bolton’s telling, Trump was willing to make a sweetheart trade deal, lift sanctions on China’s telecom company ZTE and decline prosecution against Huawei to ingratiate himself with China and get what he thought would power his reelection.
Bolton, who chose to continue working for Trump while he says this was going on, remained silent, making him a mercenary who put a book deal above his country. That also makes him nearly as despicable as the man who he says betrayed his country, for without Bolton’s silence, Trump might have been caught red-handed in selling out the United States’ interests to retain power. This suggests that decent Americans should not reward Bolton by buying his book. But what does it say about Trump and the Republican senators who voted to acquit?
Trump’s alleged disdain for elections and enthusiasm for China’s concentration camps that Bolton conveys should not surprise informed voters. Trump, who responded to Bolton’s claims by calling him a “liar,” has been sucking up to dictators and demeaning democratic institutions from the day he was elected. Such entreaties to China would be analogous to his scheme to extort Ukraine; both entail selling out U.S. interests.
In a written statement, former vice president Joe Biden persuasively argues: “Donald Trump’s behavior disgraces the American presidency. We knew that long before today’s revelations.” He also implies, not unreasonably but without direct evidence, that Trump’s refusal to defend the United States against the novel coronavirus pandemic resulted from his desire to curry favor with China. Biden asserts:
For months, our country and the world have suffered through the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 117,000 Americans have lost their lives and tens of millions of workers are unemployed — and we’ve been hurt far worse because of Donald Trump's inability to lead and his failure to meet the crisis. Today we learned more about the depth and nature of that failure.Why didn’t he act when the warning signs were so clear? Why did he ignore his briefings from the intelligence community, the warnings from his own team, and from me? Why did he repeatedly praise the Chinese government and President Xi as the coronavirus spread? Because he wanted to have a trade deal with China as a talking point for his re-election campaign.
Many of us suspected that this might be the case given Trump’s incessant groveling to China (or other dictatorships). Perhaps this influenced his unwarranted praise of China’s response to the pandemic, his aversion to calling out China earlier and his failure to cut off travel from China sooner. He is quite simply an easy mark for dictators who recognize how easily he can be manipulated.
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Anyone outside the Trump cult will be unsurprised by Bolton’s allegations. We knew Trump was willing to sell out to any foreign country. He invited foreign interference from the White House driveway. The ones who really will suffer, deservedly so, from Bolton’s account are the Republican senators who refused to hear his testimony and then voted to acquit (for lack of evidence, some said). Bolton’s book confirms how much harder it would have been for them to let Trump off the hook had a longtime conservative known for copious note-taking been called to testify.
Bolton’s testimony would have highlighted how deep in the tank Republicans were for Trump and how uninterested they were in defending the Constitution. But surely they knew the book would come out, right? They must have hoped — and likely still do — that by now no one will care, that the passage of time will have dimmed our memories of their political cowardice. It’s true that much has happened since then; many calamities have befallen the country, precisely because they left Trump in place. But voters must not forget their circular reasoning and incoherent explanations for their acquittal votes.
I come back time and again to House impeachment manager Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif. ), who brilliantly summed up the stakes in his closing remarks to the Senate:
We must say enough — enough! He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.
Schiff got one thing wrong, however. He told the Senate, “You are decent. He is not who you are.” Actually, Senate Republicans are not decent — nor loyal or worthy of our trust. They stood by Trump when even the evidence available at the time weighed in favor of impeachment. They turned a blind eye to a witness whose testimony would have been even more persuasive. They were and are enablers of the most destructive president in our history and deserve — every last one of them — to be booted out of office. In Schiff’s words, their names “will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history.”
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