The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton review – a monument to his own grandiosity

Any hairdresser could have told them it wouldn’t work. Trump initially refused to hire John Bolton because he disliked his moustache. That walrus brush, which looks like a grizzled version of the cow-catching guard rails on an ancient locomotive, annoyed the elderly combed-over dandy. Trump’s spun-sugar plumage starts behind one of his ears, circles round his scalp, hardens under a toxic rain of spray, then tapers into a jaunty duck tail above his collar: did he envy a man who brandished such stiff bristles on his upper lip? But the Fox News sex pest Roger Ailes recommended Bolton as “a bomb thrower”, so Trump, avid for explosions, made him national security adviser.

They resolved to play good cop and bad cop, although the partnership turned out to be more like bad cop and worse cop. After a mere 18 months it fell apart. Bolton says he resigned, Trump claims to have fired him; I’m content to contemplate what nuclear theorists would call their mutually assured destruction. Now Bolton declares Trump unfit for office and accuses him of appeasing foreign despots in return for an electoral leg-up, smiling on Chinese concentration camps for Muslims and wanting American journalists executed. Trump, incapable of answering the charges, has instead defamed Bolton as a “wacko” and a “sick puppy”. In American parlance, the first means that he’s mad and should be locked up, the second that he’s disgusting and ought to be put down. Politics is the continuation of warfare by other means; it also prolongs into adulthood the name-calling of schoolboys in the playground. Yes, such superannuated adolescents hold the world’s fate in their bunched fists.

Bolton’s macho facial hair advertises his mettle as a cold warrior. His book sneers at the peaceable protocols of “international governance” and disparages Europeans as weak-kneed ninnies. Juggling phone calls at a G7 meeting, he bizarrely boasts “I felt like the Light Brigade”, and in an epigraph he echoes the Duke of Wellington’s rallying cry to his troops at Waterloo. Yet when Bolton says “my scar tissue had scars”, the cicatrices are merely metaphorical. Although he enjoys sending others into battle, in 1969 he avoided service in Vietnam by joining the non-combatant national guard. His excuse? He disdained participation in a losing war.

Trump, another draft dodger, at first appears to be thrillingly keen for conflict. “Holy fuck!” he yelps when the vixenish Melania shafts one of Bolton’s aides. “Hit ’em, finish ’em,” he grunts during a dispute with the Turks. “Kick their ass,” he orders an envoy to China. But his rampages are mostly rhetorical, no different, as Bolton says, from the way that Obama “graced the world with his views, doing nothing to see them carried out”, a comment that incidentally reveals what Trump and Bolton hate about Obama: they can’t forgive his grace under pressure.

While Bolton pleads for a “kinetic response”, Trump frustrates him by cancelling war games to placate North Korea and calling off a strike on Iran because a paltry 150 casualties are predicted. When Trump reconsiders his initial wheeze of invading or annexing Venezuela, Bolton diagnoses “a case of the vapours”, that affliction of sensitive 19th-century females. Could the famed pussy-grabber be a wuss? Even Mike Pence, that stalwart Christian soldier, lapses into campy lingo when he reports on Trump’s jockeying with the Ukrainian president. “Just between us girls,” pouts Pence as he whispers an update into Bolton’s ear.

Trepidation gets the better of Bolton just once: he admits he never asked what Trump thought of Putin because he was “afraid of what I might hear”. Despite the promise of the book’s title, Bolton was not in the room during Trump’s extended confab with Putin in Helsinki, from which Putin emerged as cockily as a strutting bantam while Trump stumbled out like a trodden hen with ruffled feathers. Nor, in further blows to Bolton’s bravado, did the unspecific “it” invoked by the title always happen. For the most part, this memoir compiled from bureaucratic memos lists Bolton’s failures to incite what he calls “existential” showdowns with Nato and the EU or Syria and Iran. He missed his best chance to change history when, reluctant to spoil his eventual book sales, he declined to speak up during Trump’s impeachment. He did offer to let the Senate subpoena him, confident that the Republican majority would not want to hear from witnesses for the prosecution. In an epilogue, he offers a variant of his unrepentant apology for sitting out Vietnam: why bother, since impeachment was a lost cause.

When it’s not tallying Trump’s offences, Bolton’s book is a monument to his own grandiosity. One chapter title quotes Antony’s threatening prediction about “the dogs of war” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and the Caesarism of Trump and his authoritarian buddies in Turkey, Brazil, Russia and China is a recurrent theme. Institutionally and even architecturally, Washington DC models itself on republican Rome, where right-minded senators reined in or struck down aspiring emperors. We get a glimpse of this latter-day Roman ethos when General John Kelly, enraged by a tiff with Trump, says: “I’m going out to Arlington.” At serious times, Bolton remarks, Kelly drove to the national cemetery to calm down by brooding at the grave of his son, a marine killed in Afghanistan.

Bolton defers to the same lofty standards. To explain why he refused the first jobs Trump dangled before him, he quotes Joseph Addison’s neoclassical tragedy Cato – a play much admired by George Washington because it traces the conscientious resistance of a stoic who defended the republic against Caesar’s tyranny. “When vice prevails and impious men bear sway,” declares Cato in stately pentameters, “the post of honour is a private station.” But where Addison’s hero finally recognises that “the world was made for Caesar” and kills himself in despair, Bolton chose to collude with a vicious and impious man. Now, rather than attitudinising on a pedestal in a post of honour, he will forever be a footnote in the annals of infamy.

• The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15