McRAE, Ga. — It’s appalling to see the seal of the U.S. State Department desecrated. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, has no conscience, so I assume it did not occur to him that settling scores with John Bolton, the former national security adviser, beneath that seal was wrong, an affront to the honor of every Foreign Service officer.
Pompeo called Bolton a “traitor” in an official written statement. He accused Bolton of “spreading a number of lies, fully spun half-truths and outright falsehoods” in his new book, “The Room Where It Happened.” Pompeo gave his statement a headline worthy of the great schoolyard tradition of the Trump administration: “I Was in the Room Too.”
It is not a fully spun half-truth that Pompeo has sullied the State Department with his disgraceful treatment of the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, whom he sacrificed to sate President Trump’s quest for dirt on Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. It’s the truth.
Nor is it a fully spun half-truth that, in his toadying to Trump, Pompeo has guided the United States, for the first time since 1945, into utter irrelevance in dealing with a major global crisis, insisting that the pandemic be called the “Wuhan virus” rather than seeking unity with allies. It’s the truth.
Pompeo, obsessed with the chimera of regime change in Iran to the point of blindness to the pandemic’s impact there, fixated on coddling Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to the point of excusing the murder of a Washington Post journalist, is a man who should look long and hard at himself in the mirror before calling anyone a traitor. An abdication of the values his department stands for has been the mark of his tenure.
It is both sad and dangerous, to use Pompeo’s words, that he has so damaged the State Department’s reputation, built over centuries of service and sacrifice.
A lie is an outright falsehood, by the way, and I have no idea how a half-truth is fully spun. It does not matter. Pompeo knows that he serves a president whose currency is untruth. Anything he says on the subject of veracity is by definition meaningless. The secretary of state sold out long ago.
I have no truck with Bolton. His long-held desire to bomb Iran (frustrated most recently by Trump), his contempt for the European Union, his loathing of the United Nations, and his dismissal of diplomacy have been the hallmarks of a ferocious hawk with a quixotic belief in himself. Bolton is a byword for macho baloney. That any liberal, fixated on terminating Trump, is prepared to give him the time of day is a comment on the delirium of our times.
Nothing I have seen quoted from Bolton’s book surprises me — not the administrative chaos, not the president’s coddling of dictators, not even Trump asking China to buy farm goods to boost his re-election prospects (we learned with Ukraine that entire nations exist only insofar as they serve Trump’s personal ambition). With respect to one million Uighurs in Chinese concentration camps, Bolton says that Trump backed President Xi Jinping. “According to our interpreter,” he writes. “Trump said Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”
We know Trump likes dictators from Hungary to Saudi Arabia. We know that Trump dislikes Muslims. We know he envies Xi his autocratic powers, just as he envies Vladimir Putin’s. We know Trump does not care about human rights. We know that Pompeo has been the enabler of Trump’s worst instincts on the international stage.
There is nothing revelatory in the Bolton book, if revelation is taken to mean something more than adding sordid detail to a well-established narrative.
The book is a nonevent. It is the ultimate inside-the-Beltway media circus. It will not move the needle one millimeter with respect to Trump’s future or his prospects in the Nov. 3 election.
Perhaps that view is influenced by viewing the goings-on from conservative rural Georgia, where I’ve been doing some reporting and where support for Trump remains strong. The things Bolton says seem fantastically remote, cloyingly familiar and strikingly irrelevant.
It’s safe to say that a week from now nobody will care.
Bolton knew what he was getting into, just like Pompeo. Trump had an interesting interview with The Wall Street Journal the other day. In it he said, “I did something good. … I made Juneteenth very famous.” He continued, “Nobody had ever heard of it.”
Trump thinks he made Juneteenth famous by initially scheduling a rally in Tulsa on that date, before being told this was offensive to African-Americans and rescheduling for June 20. During the interview he asks an aide if she has ever heard of Juneteenth. The aide replies that the White House issued a statement last year commemorating the day. “Oh, really?” Trump says.
Yes, really. America is flying blind.
Bolton has done plenty of harm, but it is not he “who damaged America by violating his sacred trust with its people,” in Pompeo’s words. It is the president Pompeo continues to serve with such assiduous sycophancy.
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