Trump had no philosophy, no principles and no plan to govern, and yet the GOP supported his rise to power – with distastrous consequences. The party needs to understand how that happened before it can do better

This article appeared in The Globe and Mail on January 16, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
January 16, 2020

The United States, its Constitution and its civic structures suffered a miserable four years during Donald Trump’s presidency. His duplicity, short attention span, ignorance of history and cluelessness about the actual workings of the very government he headed – among other things – brought to the Oval Office unequalled incompetence. His words and his conduct exacerbated partisan tensions – already too high when he took office – and undermined public faith in the integrity of critical government institutions, particularly the credibility of America’s entire electoral process.

Mr. Trump’s tenure would have dismayed the Founding Fathers – most tragically on Jan. 6, when he incited a mob to enter the Capitol building in Washington, intending to disrupt Congress from fulfilling its constitutional responsibility to certify the 2020 election results. His second impeachment by the House of Representatives, and the general public outrage, show how unhappy Americans are with his conduct.

While the Constitution is fortunately far stronger than the likes of Mr. Trump, we should nonetheless all remember Ronald Reagan’s wise counsel: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States, where men were free.”

Mr. Trump’s departure from office is a relief, but it obviously does not repair the significant damage he has caused. To begin the recovery effort, we must understand fully why Mr. Trump’s appearance on America’s political scene represented an aberration of historical dimensions. Once that phenomenon is better appreciated, the way forward becomes clearer.

Fundamentally, Mr. Trump has no philosophy, does not think in terms of “policy” (as we normally understand that term) and sees essentially everything through the prism of what benefits Donald Trump. Thus, his decisions as President constitute “an archipelago of dots,” as I wrote in my recent book, not a coherent pattern resting on principles and logic. Mr. Trump is not a conservative. He is not a liberal, either. He is simply entirely pro-Trump.

His favourite lawyer, Roy Cohn, once described how former senator Joseph McCarthy (a Republican from Wisconsin) became an anti-Communist: “Joe McCarthy bought anti-communism in much the same way as other people purchase a new automobile. The salesman showed him the model; he looked at it with interest, examined it more closely, kicked the tires, sat at the wheel, squiggled in the seat, asked some questions and bought. It was just as cold as that.”

It is entirely possible that Mr. Cohn taught Mr. Trump this very lesson about “conservatism.” Whatever the background, the contrast between Mr. Reagan and Mr. Trump could not be more vivid.

Mr. Trump’s approach to business in his pre-White House years, which he himself has described, was entirely transactional: buy this property, sell that property and move on to the next deal. Mr. Trump’s final balance sheet has not yet been written, and it may be that his transactional style brought him all that he wanted in private life. For America’s governance, however, it is wholly inadequate – especially in national-security matters.

Without a coherent philosophical framework, Mr. Trump’s decisions (including all those with which I strongly agreed) emerged through discrete deals that he found beneficial to him personally, not because he “believed” in what he was doing. A roulette wheel is more philosophically consistent than Mr. Trump’s decision-making.

This is far from saying, of course, that Mr. Trump made only erroneous substantive decisions as President. Au contraire. During the 2016 campaign, to gain the support of conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, he promised to nominate judges who were originalists in their interpretation of the Constitution and laws. This he did. He endorsed, if elected, lower taxes and less economic regulation – orthodoxy that any Republican presidential nominee would advocate. This he did. He repeatedly stressed opposition to the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and pledged to withdraw from it. This he did. (And, in full disclosure, ramrodding this withdrawal through the bureaucracy was my principal focus during my first 30 days as national security adviser – something in which I take considerable satisfaction.)

On the other hand, Mr. Trump was the most profligate spender in U.S. history, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic, when fiscal discipline disappeared from a nominally “Republican” White House. Why should Mr. Trump care? It’s not his money. He supported reversal of criminal sentencing principles that had been hard-fought-for under Mr. Reagan, whose administration sought to limit the federal judiciary’s sentencing discretion, especially to prevent overly lenient sentences.

In the national-security field, Mr. Trump, among other mistakes, blotted his copybook by craving a new deal with Iran’s ayatollahs on their nuclear weapons program; by seeking deals with strongmen Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and so on ad infinitum. I can say with confidence he had little or no idea what the terms of such deals would be. He simply wanted deals he could announce with great fanfare because he saw them as marks of success. Who reads the fine print, anyway?

Worst of all, his erratic, non-strategic, utterly self-centred approach led directly to the disastrous U.S. response to the pandemic. This was a slow-moving crisis, one with terrible human costs. In a fast-moving international crisis – say, a nuclear confrontation with Russia or China – I believe Mr. Trump’s flaws would have almost certainly recurred. Fortunately, we were spared such a scenario, but had one erupted, Mr. Trump might well have simply melted down.

Mr. Trump’s opponents on the left side of the political spectrum routinely group his personal faults together with his decisions as President. In the same breath, for example, opponents list his mendaciousness, his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and his lack of self-discipline as if they were equivalent failings. They are attacking both Mr. Trump and the conservative philosophy as if the two were interchangeable. Doing so may gratify the critics, but it is fundamentally mistaken analytically.

For conservatives at least, it is precisely the important distinction between Mr. Trump’s personal deficiencies and his utter lack of any philosophy that should be our focus looking ahead. In concrete political terms, that means above all fixing conservatism’s chosen political vehicle, the Republican Party. The damage Mr. Trump caused is real, and, from his Mar-a-Lago bunker, he will likely obstruct our repair efforts. But the task is far from insuperable.

What model should Republicans follow? Returning to a Reaganite view of public policy, domestically and internationally, would do just fine. Today’s issues are obviously different from Mr. Reagan’s time, but his principles remain correct, never better explained than in his Oval Office farewell address just days before his second term ended in January, 1989. In those remarks, we also saw Mr. Reagan’s characteristic optimism, so different from Trump’s “American carnage.”

One of Reagan’s anecdotes, embodying both policy and perspective, stands out – he called it “a small story about a big ship, and a refugee and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at the height of the boat people, and the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat – and crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship, and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up and called out to him. He yelled, ‘Hello, American sailor – hello, Freedom Man.’”

These are words Mr. Trump is simply incapable of uttering, let alone conceiving.

Returning to Mr. Reagan’s fundamental conservative principles leads some to ask who the “new” Reagan will be. That is the wrong approach. Indeed, it is dangerously close to the mistake many made with Mr. Trump. Politics, at least for conservatives, is about policy, not personalities. One of Mr. Trump’s worst consequences was torquing America’s political discourse around the question whether people agreed with Mr. Trump or not. That is, ultimately, a totally irrelevant question. Loyalty oaths to individuals contravene basic democratic theory – our loyalties should have higher aspirations: the country, the Constitution and our conscience.

There will never be another Ronald Reagan, just as the Democrats will never have another Franklin D. Roosevelt. Instead, looking to the 2022 midterm House and Senate elections and the 2024 presidential race, Republicans should seek candidates who can articulate a conservative philosophy, not fealty to any individual.

In the wake of Mr. Trump, emphasizing character must also be a key factor. Many decent, honourable people agree that Mr. Trump had a hole where his character should have been, but argued nonetheless that Republicans had to overlook this unpleasant reality. We cannot allow ourselves to settle for second-best (or worse). Looking ahead, we should insist that we recruit, nominate and elect candidates who are both philosophically conservative and possessed of real character.

To be successful, therefore, conservatives will need to spend considerable time and effort over the next four years fixing the institutions and structures of the Republican Party. It is essential that party committees and organizations remain strictly neutral as members select nominees at all levels: local, state and federal. Neither Mr. Trump nor anyone else should be allowed to tip the scales in their favour, or in favour of candidates they endorse. Ensuring this neutrality at the Republican National Committee – for example, in allowing fair and equitable access to its enormous amount of voter information, polling data and the like – is crucial. Party structures should not be at anyone’s beck and call – certainly not Mr. Trump’s. Over the next several years, all eyes will be on the RNC leadership, and the state parties, to ensure scrupulous neutrality.

Defeat does not entitle Mr. Trump to further influence – it entitles him to retirement. At noon on Jan. 20, everyone should understand that Mr. Trump moved from the most powerful office in the world to the swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago. He will doubtless still have influence, but he does not have power. This is a decisive inflection point, dawning on everyone with increasing clarity. Even before the Jan. 6 tragedy, Mr. Trump’s influence was declining, as reflected in December’s congressional override of his veto of the crucial defence authorization bill. Mr. Trump, of course, is a major contributor to his own decline, by falsely denying the outcome of the 2020 election, and provoking both the congressional efforts to overturn those elections and the mob that entered the Capitol at his behest. This is fitting: Mr. Trump is always the star in his own mind – even when shooting himself in the foot.

Joe Biden’s inauguration reflects not only Mr. Trump’s loss of power, but the dramatic and irreversible shift of the U.S.’s attention to the new administration. I take no joy in this, especially in the national-security domain, because I believe the new president’s likely policy directions will frequently be grievously in error. But it is also inevitable, as new policy lines are drawn and new political battles break out, that the national attention will focus on current events and not the rapidly receding past. In addition to substantive disagreements, in Congress it has ever been true that “the duty of the opposition is to oppose.” More likely than not, therefore, internal Republican disagreements over Mr. Trump – which remain significant – will nonetheless subside over time as Republicans unite to make their shared rejection of Mr. Biden’s policies more effective. Who will cite a disgraced Mr. Trump as support for any policy position? No Republican who expects to succeed over the long term, that is certain.

The Biden administration’s opening years thus represent for Republicans a two-front struggle: repairing their damaged party while simultaneously preventing the new administration, faced with a Congress in both houses divided almost exactly 50-50, from achieving its worst philosophical objectives. There is little time left to worry about what Mr. Trump says or does. He should go play golf. We have better things to do.

The sooner the Trump aberration passes, the better

This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on January 8, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
January 8, 2020

January 6 was one of the saddest days in American history. A sitting President incited a mob of his supporters to attack the United States Capitol building, where the Senate and House of Representatives were meeting in the Constitutionally required joint session to count the votes of the Electoral College. Donald Trump’s clear intention in urging this act of violence against the final concluding act of the 2020 presidential election was to disrupt the counting procedure, thereby buying more time to escape the otherwise inevitable outcome of the election.

This is as shameful as it gets, but it is nonetheless only one of a long series of shameful acts by Trump before, during, and after the November election. He has lied repeatedly about what happened in that election, convincing millions of decent, honest people that his opponents committed systematic fraud, in effect conning his own supporters. If there is evidence of this fraud, Trump has yet to provide it to any judicial or administrative tribunal, Federal or state. In his view, the anti-Trump conspiracy is so vast and so successful that it left behind no evidence. Either that, or his campaign had the worst team of lawyers in Anglo-American legal history.

Trump’s charade promulgated the idea that Congress could overturn the duly certified results of the election from the key battleground states, enough to shift the Electoral College majority to his favour. And there was more: that somehow his Vice President, Mike Pence, would ignore the plain words of the Constitution, and impose his own outcome on the election, by deciding which state certificates of the results to count and which to ignore.

The Framers created the Electoral College for the sole purpose of electing the President. It has no other role; like Brigadoon, it comes and goes every four years. Clear logic underlies this approach: to create a true separation of powers, Congress’s role in presidential elections had to be limited to a purely formal duty to declare the results. The Frames rejected a parliamentary system, with a President in any way dependent on Congress for his legitimacy. (In the truly exceptional case where no presidential candidate has an Electoral College majority, the House votes on the rule of one vote per state, not on the basis of individual House members).

In addition, the Constitution left the essentially exclusive responsibility for the “manner” of selecting the Electoral College to the States, not the national government. The certificates of election outcomes are sent by the responsible State official to the Vice President in his capacity as President of the Senate (a dual role that forms a key part of “the checks and balances”). What happens next is plainly stated in the Twelfth Amendment: “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted.”

That’s it. Nothing more. Trump’s plans for Congress and the Vice President were themselves assaults on the Constitutional order, an effort to replace the state elections with his preferred outcome as dictated by majorities in Congress. It was appalling in its own right, and doomed to fail, which it ultimately did.

Trump and his supporters, therefore, were threatening grievous harm to two pillars of the American constitutional system: the separation of powers (at the national level) and federalism (the division of powers between the national and state governments). Not surprisingly, these two precepts are also foundational to American conservative thought. If proof were ever needed that Trump is not a conservative, there it is.

Realising that his effort at what Washington attorney Chuck Cooper (my long-time friend and colleague at the Reagan Justice Department) called “a congressional coup” was failing, Trump decided to resort to force. At a rally a few hours before Congress convened on January 6, Trump said to his supporters, “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.” Key adviser Rudy Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” They knew exactly what they wanted, and so did the supporters.

Fortunately, they failed. They failed in their attempted congressional coup, and they failed in their attempted violent coup. The Constitution was tested, and stood strong. The Trump aberration will pass, the sooner the better. American conservatives have considerable work ahead to repair the damage that Trump has inflicted on our country, our civil discourse, and the Republican Party. But they are only damaged, not broken. Trump is the one who has been broken, and deservedly so.

John Bolton is a former National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump and former US ambassador to the United Nations.

This article appeared in The Washington Post on December 10, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
December 10, 2020

On Monday, Donald Trump will officially lose the 2020 presidential election. In their respective states, electoral college delegations chosen by the citizens will meet to cast their ballots. If there are no “faithless” electors, 306 votes will go to Joe Biden for president and Kamala D. Harris for vice president, and 232 to Trump and Mike Pence. There will be no lawful way to change this result.

Most Americans will be relieved that the election is over. Unfortunately, too many Republicans will see only the ratification of a “stolen election.” Why? Because for months Trump has proclaimed he could lose only through foul play, and because too few Republicans said this was nonsense.

Rather than “America First,” Trump’s true slogan is “Trump First,” so his fantasy will not end easily. Nonetheless, starting with the resolution of the electoral college vote, Republicans, and all Americans, can take significant steps to move beyond Nov. 3, without endless, debilitating reargument of what happened.

First, everyone — Republicans especially — should recognize that the national political dynamic will change irrevocably at noon on Jan. 20. It will never be the same again for Trump. There will be a new president, doing his job, whether Trump adjusts to it or not. Even though barely more than five weeks now remain until the transfer of power, many who have been unable or unwilling to feel the tectonic plates shifting will finally recognize the change. Mar-a-Lago is not the same as the Oval Office. Foreign leaders will not flock to Florida for meetings.

Despite four years as president, Trump never fully grasped the issues before him, and he won’t learn anything new once he leaves. His observations will become increasingly irrelevant.

Trump will not disappear entirely. But the thrill will assuredly fade.

Second, with this coming dramatic shift in the political universe in mind, every Republican as of next Monday’s electoral college vote should publicly acknowledge what they have known in silence for many weeks: Biden is the president-elect. We Republicans should all just say it and get it over with.

If confronted by bitter-enders, stuck on Trump and dreaming of continuing the fight, for example on Jan. 6 when the electoral college ballots are opened and counted in Congress, Republicans should take their cue from Nancy Reagan: Just say no.

Third, there is every reason to believe Republicans can make Democrats’ hold on the White House last just one term. Analysts across the political spectrum have noted the GOP’s November successes, other than Trump’s loss. Winning at all levels in coming elections, however, requires a party not obsessed with contemplating its 2020 presidential navel.

That will necessitate disbanding the GOP’s circular firing squads now blasting away in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere. This internecine warfare is not along ideological lines; by any coherent measure, all the main participants are conservatives. The common denominator is that Trump set these dumpster fires to advance his own interests.

The Republican Party’s lasting strength is its focus on policy, not personalities, and certainly not cults. To reclaim the high ground, national, state and local party structures must focus impartially on enhancing support for all Republicans, not just Trump. We must have open debates on policy, and new platforms reflecting those debates. As long as Trump continues broaching a possible 2024 candidacy, this neutrality is threatened.

Any party official unable to remain impartial should be a candidate for retirement. Historically, after presidential-election defeats, Republicans have sought new party leadership. Following Barry Goldwater’s 1964 defeat, Ray Bliss took charge as national chairman, with excellent 1966 and 1968 results; after Gerald Ford’s 1976 loss, Bill Brock stepped up and laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory.

This is an entirely normal intra-party transition. It is not about any particular losing candidate or party official, and saying so casts no blame. But without ironclad assurances of impartiality by current party officials, based on their personal honor, Republicans risk missing a big opportunity for revitalization. Contested elections for party positions are not bad things.

Fourth, speaking as a baby boomer, I make perhaps the most painful point: Republicans should begin thinking about finally selecting a non-boomer presidential candidate. Recalling Ronald Reagan’s line about Walter Mondale, the “youth and inexperience” of these late-comers may be a burden for them, but it should not be insuperable.

If Biden again bears the Democratic standard in 2024 — when he will turn 82 — and faces a non-boomer Republican opponent, the contrast will be palpable. If Biden doesn’t run, and a 78-year-old Trump is again the Republican nominee, the contrast will also be palpable. This one should not be hard for the GOP, as long as the succession is based on merit, not heredity.

How the GOP can regain the voters Trump alienated, but also keep those whom he attracted.

This article appeared in The Dispatch on November 30, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 30, 2020

Donald Trump’s post-November 3 conduct has been consistent with his entire presidency: wholly centered on Donald Trump. One of the worst consequences of this self-indulgence for conservatives is the treacherous fixation on whether one agrees or disagrees with Trump. Even when he embraces some element of conservative truth, he typically so exaggerates or distorts it that one can barely discern the underlying principle.

Or worse. Remember, for example, his diktat at an April 13 coronavirus briefing: “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be.” An unvarnished Trumpism, made in Trumpian style, and utterly contradictory to American conservative thinking.

Rather than aligning with principle (which Trump lacks), long-standing conservatives torqued themselves uncomfortably to support his positions. This is unnatural and unwise, and we must stop it. Politics based on personality rather than philosophy is not conservatism’s credo. When politicians go astray, we judge their failures against our principles. We do not readjust our principles to suit their personal interests, as the paradigm case of Richard Nixon demonstrates. James Buckley, New York’s Conservative Party senator, was the first Republican to call for Nixon’s resignation. In the congressional delegation to the Oval Office that told Nixon he had to go, Barry Goldwater had the most impact.

Liberal pundits complain ceaselessly that today’s Republicans do not demonstrate sufficient courage against Trump. This is surely what liberals want to believe, but they misread conservatives as badly as Trump’s misreading that he owns the party.

Consider Michigan, where Trump’s post-election conspiracy theories met their Waterloo. Defeated by more than 150,000 votes, he authorized litigation asserting massive fraud and electoral malfeasance, as he did nationwide. Not one of his cases produced facts changing even a single vote. This conspiracy must be so vast and so successful that it left no evidence behind, making it modern history’s pre-eminent covert operation.

Rebuffed in state and federal courts, Trump abandoned legal reasoning for pure political force, attempting to rewrite the constitutional role of state legislators to generate slates of pro-Trump electors. He summoned Mike Shirkey and Lee Chatfield, the top Republicans in Michigan’s Senate and House, to Washington, hoping to intimidate them into overturning their state’s counting and certification process. They refused.

The pressure shifted to Michigan’s State Board of Canvassers. The Republican national and Michigan state chairs urged the board to postpone certification for two weeks, thereby enabling more mischief. Republican board member Aaron Van Langevelde disagreed, in plainly conservative terms: “We have a clear legal duty to certify the results of the election, as shown by the returns that were given to us. … We cannot and should not go beyond that. As John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men.’”

Shirkey, Chatfield and Van Langevelde are heroes, and far from alone. National GOP leaders can profit from their example. If these three Michiganders can do it, so can the rest of us.

With Trump’s efforts now defeated in fact, if not yet in his imagination, what comes next? One immediate project is producing documentation analogous to the Black Book of Communism, to serve as a definitive refutation of Trump’s extravagant, unsubstantiated claims of “stealing the election.” Such a work will not convince all conspiracy theorists, but we need an authoritative, even encyclopedic, recital of the truth for future use.

Longer term, there must be a broad “conversation” about the direction of the conservative movement and the Republican party. Much of the havoc Trump wreaked is uniquely due to his ego, his public style, and his distortion of basic conservative philosophy. We should have no illusions that excising Trump’s lesions from the body politic will be easy. Many conservatives invested themselves in his success and have not yet receded. Still, there is no point in demanding that they confess error as an auto da fe. We need instead a “malice toward none, charity toward all” approach, which is fully justified by the Democratic left’s larger threat, whether from Biden or his successors.

Our objective should be restoring to conservatism an unmistakably Reaganite optimism and confidence: the “morning in America” crowd defending our “shining city on a hill,” not Trump’s dystopian “American carnage” approach. We can thereby regain the voters Trump alienated, but also keep those whom he attracted. Blue-collar families who left the Democratic party in 1980 were called “Reagan Democrats,” and those who have voted for Trump are essentially their contemporary counterparts. The proposed “conversation” may be lengthy, but there is every reason to believe it will succeed with enough work.

We need to start now, in time for Georgia’s critical January 5 runoffs. Victory for incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler will produce a 52-vote Republican Senate majority, a major check against Biden administration excesses. Placating desolate Trump supporters is purportedly the rationale for not speaking truthfully about Trump’s defeat, but hard political logic points in exactly the opposite direction. By pursuing his personal interests, Trump has vastly complicated the prospects for winning both runoffs. For no reason other than ego, he induced Perdue and Loeffler to demand the resignation of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state. Now, some Trump supporters argue for boycotting Perdue and Loeffler because they are insufficiently pro-Trump, perhaps writing in Trump’s own name to show their dissatisfaction.

Nothing like fratricide to kick off a crucial election campaign. Obviously, keeping a GOP Senate majority is the immediate electoral priority, which underscores precisely why remaining silent on Trump’s conspiracy theories is so damaging. His impending campaign visit to Georgia could well cause more harm. Republican voters will accept the truth if explained rationally by responsible party leaders. But if all they hear is Trump barking, they may well believe, and far beyond Georgia, that no one disputes his version of “the stolen elections.” That would be dangerous beyond calculation.

Looking toward 2024, the risks of silence only grow. The “Trump lane” to the party’s presidential nomination will be congested, especially if Trump is still in it. Just as Democrats almost blew their 2020 prospects by endlessly rehashing “Russian collusion,” we could do the same by relitigating “the steal” merely to gratify Trump’s fantasy. While a crowded race to be Trump’s heir would free up lanes for those who do not seek that role, such lanes might disappear if the “stolen election” becomes dogma. It is far easier to avoid this calamity by speaking now, rather than waiting until minds and memories are hardened by unrefuted Trump logorrhea.

Preparing the battlefield for 2024 will largely unfold through Republican responses to Biden’s priorities. We will see no lack of enthusiasm for the opposition party’s most important duty: opposition. The issue is whether we proceed in Trump mode, further undermining the integrity and legitimacy of our institutions, or whether we fight as true conservatives, attacking leftist policies without despoiling the foundations of America’s flourishing.

The Senate in particular will have a frontline role dealing with the Biden presidency through the “advice and consent” process for his nominees. Several Republican senators have already criticized those nominated for national-security positions, laying down markers that they might fight confirmation. I agree with their policy critiques, especially Biden’s likely fecklessness on China. What they have not addressed, however, is the Senate’s proper role in assessing executive branch nominees (life-tenured judicial nominees residing in a completely separate analytical framework). In a world truer to the intent of the Framers, the Senate would grant wide deference to a president’s choices, recognizing that his views control executive policies, not the views of his subordinates. The legitimate targets of opposition should be only those with grave personal failings or views beyond the range of reason.

I have some standing to raise this issue. Twice in George W. Bush’s presidency, Biden unjustifiably tried to block my nominations, first as an undersecretary of State, and later as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. My complaint, however, is constitutional, not personal. In recent years, increasing partisanship in advice-and-consent matters has risked transforming our system of separated powers into something quasi-parliamentary. So far, Biden’s nominees are not beyond the pale. Quite the contrary. He and his team instead embody Disraeli’s famous put-down of Gladstone’s front bench: “You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest.”

Allow Biden these nominees; it will serve him right. Make their confirmations miserable, to be sure. Harry them with uncomfortable questions, exposing the weaknesses in Biden’s and their own stated policy positions and records. Once they take office, haul them back repeatedly for hearings. This would all serve the greater good. I am not so naïve to believe that reversion to the norm here will arise solely from constitutional arguments. Still, one can appeal to conservative Senators aspiring to the presidency to imagine their reactions when Democrats with blood in their eyes are rampaging against their nominees. Just a suggestion.

With Trump thrashing around for the next four years and Biden in the White House, conservatives face a sustained two-front struggle. Nonetheless, it is entirely winnable with persistent concentration and effort. We must remind ourselves that it was always morning in Reagan’s America, and it should be in ours as well.

How Trump is weakening America: His refusal to concede defeat strengthens Russia and China

This article appeared in The New York Daily News on November 17, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 17, 2020

As Russia, China and other adversaries try to undermine our citizenry’s confidence in American institutions, Donald Trump has been their hopefully unwitting ally. Oblivious to anything not directly benefitting him, Trump spent much of the 2020 campaign, and has spent nearly every waking hour since Nov. 3 complaining that the outcome was rigged, and that massive conspiracies to commit fraud are overturning his re-election.

Trump’s unprecedented insistence that the core machinery of U.S. elections (voter identification and vote casting, counting and certification) is being manipulated is obviously wrong. Significant protections and safeguards are built into the electoral process in every state and county because we know that the possibilities for fraud and stolen elections are ever-present, notwithstanding the dewy-eyed view of some commentators. If Trump had evidence of election-rigging or fraud, he should have produced it by now. He has not; lawsuits have flamed out or been radically pared back.

But his continued aspersions on the 2020 election buttress the case our enemies make against us. Now, they can quote an American president for their own ends.

Without a doubt, Russian and Chinese efforts in the 2016 and 2020 elections have been devoted to undermining America’s confidence in its own institutions, increasing mistrust among our fellow citizens, and confusing the public discourse with false and misleading information. They have most certainly used cyberwarfare against the integrity of our elections, and China’s subversive efforts especially have ranged far more broadly, as Vice President Mike Pence has previously made clear.

We, and Trump in particular, do Moscow’s and Beijing’s work for them when we argue whether they favor Trump or favor Biden. Russia and China favor themselves; merely inducing Americans to argue about their strategies is likely a vital part of the strategies themselves. Trump has been told all this, but his fascination with himself bleaches out all other concerns in his public remarks.

Attacking America’s institutions is not a Republican Party or conservative hallmark. For Trump, it is something of a commonplace. For example, in a 2017 pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Trump said he respected Russia’s Vladimir Putin. O’Reilly responded that Putin was “a killer.” Trump paused for a few seconds — perhaps actually reflecting on what was he wanted to say — before responding, “We’ve got a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?”

This Trumpian moral equivalency emerges all too often. Prior to his embarrassing exchange with O’Reilly, Trump said of Putin in 2015, “he’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what he have in this country.” The list of comparable examples is depressingly long.

After Nov. 3, Trump’s antics reached fever-pitch. In nearly incoherent remarks during the early hours of Wednesday, Nov. 4, as the vote totals were turning against him, Trump said, “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” On Nov. 5, Trump said further, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” Even when he seemingly lets the truth slip out, as on Nov. 15, when he admitted a Biden win, he quickly reverses course.

All of this is propaganda, which does constitute “an embarrassment to our country,” coming as it does from the president. Trump’s record over four years, and continuing right until today, is in the sociological expression Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan popularized, “defining deviancy down” in the political world. Our expectations for Trump are so low, we have lost the capacity to be surprised.

Fortunately, however, Trump’s abnormality provides precisely the way to repair the damage his presidency, and especially his post-election performance, have caused us internationally. We must stress that Trump is an aberration, an anomaly, rather than an accurate reflection of the American system or its people. Trump’s war with the election results, sadly but ironically helpfully, is the best proof of his aberrant status.

To repair the damage that his tweets and his actions have caused in recent days, as with repairing the larger damage he has done to our reputation overseas, we need to emphasize that the 2020 election has, hopefully, brought a return to “normalcy.” Biden may not like being this century’s Warren Harding, but that may just be his lot, at least in the rest of the world’s estimate.

We will have significant debates between normal Republicans and Democrats about Biden’s foreign and domestic policies, which we and the world will welcome as normal, and this too will help repair Trump’s damage. The process could actually move quickly. Let’s hope so.

Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

China is not the juggernaut of Wall Street financiers’ imaginations, but that doesn’t make its expansionism any less of a threat.

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on November 17, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 17, 2020

With Joe Biden’s election now declared by the press, albeit still unacknowledged by Donald Trump, it is appropriate to consider what policies his administration will pursue starting Jan. 20. Any new president’s national-security policy would be more coherent, consistent and sustained than Mr. Trump’s. The risk with Mr. Biden is not that his policy will be chaotic, but that it will be badly misguided.

One thing is certain: China is the most significant international threat that America—and the global West generally—now faces. And that will be true for the rest of this century. Mr. Biden’s real views on dealing with China are obscure, more collateral damage from an election campaign that rarely debated foreign and defense policy in any substantive way.

Much remains to be seen, especially in light of China’s responsibility for worsening the coronavirus pandemic by its concealment and disinformation. Beijing’s disingenuousness has worsened U.S. public opinion about China, a shift echoed world-wide, potentially far more negatively than the adverse reactions to the 1989 Tiananmen Square repression.

Dan Blumenthal of the American Enterprise Institute has stepped into this void with “The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State.” Serious practitioners and students of U.S.-China relations will need to reckon with his analysis.

Mr. Blumenthal’s approach will catch many by surprise. He says plainly that “China has taken advantage of American complacency.” He rejects the conventional thinking that China’s domestic economy is still moving from strength to strength, thereby providing Chinese president Xi Jinping and the Communist Party with the wherewithal to insist on China’s centrality in Asia and to challenge the U.S. globally. Indeed, it is key to Mr. Blumenthal’s “China nightmare” thesis that Mr. Xi’s domestic policies (and those of his immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao) have rolled back many of the dramatic, market-oriented reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era in favor of increased state control. The Xi regime is impairing China’s economic growth (and any prospect for an innovation-based economy) and laying the basis for failure internationally. Mr. Blumenthal writes that the main thesis of his book “is that despite (or perhaps because of) China’s growing internal weaknesses, it is pushing forward grand strategic ambitions.” China is not the juggernaut of Wall Street financiers’ imaginations, but that doesn’t make its expansionism less a threat.

Mr. Blumenthal challenges received wisdom in other ways. Contrary to the prevailing mantra of China’s “peaceful rise,” his analysis stresses that Mao Zedong and his successors repeatedly used military force against their geographical neighbors. They are doing it today, from the East and South China Seas to the “line of actual control” on the disputed frontier with India.

Domestically, the Xi regime is, among other things, engaging in armed repression against ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uighurs; crushing dissent in Hong Kong (and thereby violating the “handover” agreement with the U.K.); and initiating a “social credit” system so the state can rank all Chinese citizens in every aspect of their lives, from jaywalking to dissent. China faces “insurmountable social problems,” Mr. Blumenthal writes. But “a weaker China . . . does not necessarily mean a risk-averse China.”

While China’s theft of intellectual property is a huge problem for the U.S., Mr. Blumenthal argues further, we cannot ignore the reality that America and Japan purposely transferred considerable scientific and technological knowhow to China. When we assign responsibility for the consequences of this catastrophic error, we need not look far.

Beijing apparently never received the memo that the age of empire is over. The Chinese Communists have focused on fully restoring the Qing empire’s boundaries, and no lacuna in achieving that goal is more painful than Taiwan’s de facto independence. In resolutely Orwellian fashion, China has insisted so fiercely on its distorted interpretation of the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué’s “one China” language that even Americans now unwittingly accept China’s version. That suits Beijing; it doubtless hopes Mr. Biden’s team will find those pesky Taiwanese as much a nuisance as did Jimmy Carter, for thwarting what Mr. Blumenthal calls China’s “main strategic-military priority since the end of the Cold War.”

Taiwan’s example of freedom and openness, Mr. Blumenthal contends, is enormously disruptive on the mainland. The U.S. could put the Communist Party in a vise by using information statecraft and other forms of political warfare. China has for years been waging political warfare against us, so it is well past time to implement a counterstrategy. In cyberspace, America is doing precisely that, forestalling or retaliating against efforts to influence our domestic political discourse, thus building deterrence to prevent such attacks in the future.

While a true grand strategy toward China is urgently needed, Beijing’s obsession with Taipei provides Washington an asymmetric response to objectionable Chinese behavior. We can answer its belligerence and intransigence through diplomatic or political means, wounding the Chinese Communists deeply, and simultaneously bolstering Taiwan.

The most consequential step, one I have urged for over 20 years, is for America to grant Taiwan full diplomatic recognition. By all customary international law criteria (a defined territory and population, a capital city, and a government carrying out normal governmental functions), Taiwan is a sovereign state, and democratic to boot. Relations between the U.S. and China would chill dramatically, but that is what China should fear, not America. There are smaller steps Washington could take. We could, for example, regularly receive Taiwanese officials in U.S. government buildings, which would seriously undermine the legitimacy of China’s campaign to force Taiwan into a morganatic union.

Our relations with Beijing will not get easier over the next four years. Mr. Blumenthal has done the Biden administration a favor with “The China Nightmare.” Let’s hope the president-elect takes advantage of it.