Sleepy Who, Now?
Donald Trump’s notorious penchant for childish nicknames culminated, perhaps, with his decision to dignify the 2020 election by referring to his opponent as “Sleepy” Joe Biden. Ironically, Bolton paints Trump as a man who capable of falling asleep even at summit meeting with the head of state of one of America’s most important allies.
He never fell out of his chair and didn’t seem to miss anything important, but he was, in the immortal words of one of my Fort Polk drill sergeants, “checking his eyelids for pinholes.”
North Korea
Trump made a huge deal of sabre rattling North Korean strongman Kim Jung-Un into a summit meeting only to have it produce nothing substantive. Making things even worse, his lack of follow-up to the rattling of sabers emboldened Kim to being testing more and more missiles equipped with greater and greater capacity for causing annihilation. The consequence is put into a simple simile by Bolton:
“We made a weathervane look like the Rock of Gibraltar.”
President Bluto in Roomful of Neidermeyers
Bolton, as usual, takes credit for something that he claims would have been a great idea that he never actually pushed for so, as usual, we’ll never actually know. His idea was to streamline the system and processes for active trade policy debate using the structural foundation of the NSC in cooperation with the National Economic Council:
“but there was only one person who thought that was a good idea: me. Instead, the issues were discussed in weekly meetings, chaired by Trump, in the Roosevelt Room or the Oval, that more closely resembled college food fights than careful decision-making.”
Bureaucratic Process versus Utter Chaos
Donald Trump introduced a level of chaos to the bureaucratic foundation of government unlike anything which had ever even been considered before. Many predicted beforehand that the slow grinding gears of that process which had taken two centuries to perfect would wield the same influence over Trump’s reckless management style that it wielded over getting anything done in Congress until the very last minute of the very last day of a deadline. Many were shocked at the way the bureaucracy’s spine was ripped from its body in much the same way that spines were ripped from the backs of elected GOP politicians at every level of government:
“At most, the internal NSC structure was no more than the quiver of a butterfly’s wings in the tsunami of Trump’s chaos.”
The ADHD Presidency
Most reports from those in the room during the Trump administration paint a portrait of Donald Trump that is equitable to an extreme case of a student with ADHD who has suddenly gone completely off his meds after diligently taking them for years. Not just chaos, but a world leader subject to the changing his mind about something he had just asserted five minutes before complicated by the fact that he was also subject to adopting whatever point of view was expressed by the last person he walked with:
“It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine, not the West Wing of the White House.”
