February 13, 2025
In “The Room Where It Happened,” he joins a long list of malcontent “insiders” whose advice wasn’t taken.
Bolton’s sour-grapes memoir testifies not to his power and acumen but to his impotence.
Bolton’s sour-grapes memoir testifies not to his power and acumen but to his impotence.

Few events make the media purr more than a memoir written by a defector from a Republican administration. John Bolton joins a long list of such bitter memoirists, who date back to the days of David Stockman. The key to these memoirs is that they buttress the prejudices of the media. Bolton has made sure to calibrate his memoir to that requirement, blasting Trump for his alleged corruption and incompetence.

But how newsworthy are these memoirs exactly? They invariably follow the same pattern: the memoirist enters the Republican administration disagreeing with its policies; he leaves the administration disagreeing with its policies. How is that news? What’s newsworthy is not that they were fired but that they were hired in the first place.

The chief beef of such a memoirist is always the same: the president didn’t take his advice. The title of Bolton’s book should be The Room Where It Didn’t Happen. He is clearly upset that he got cut out of Trump’s decisions.

And it is fortunate for us that he did. Trump didn’t succumb to Bolton’s neocon warmongering.

“The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much,” says a review in the New York Times. In other words, his advice was never taken. Hell hath no fury like an “insider” scorned.

Trump has summed up Bolton with his usual elan: “Wacko John Bolton’s ‘exceedingly tedious’ (New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories. Said all good about me, in print, until the day I fired him. A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!”

[Interesting Read]

See Also:

(1) The Rebirth of John Bolton

(2) Secrets and Lies: Bolton’s book ‘revelations’ ring phony to conservatives and enrage the lefties

(3) John Bolton’s Shameful Tantrum

(4) Everybody in Washington hates John Bolton

(5) Bolton asks court to dismiss Justice Department’s lawsuit over release of his book