No, Donald Trump is not a nice man, although it took his re-election for this utterly omnipresent fact to penetrate the hitherto impenetrable pate of one John Bolton. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, M. Moustache, America’s most compulsive interventionist, a man who once demanded that the U.S. invade Luxembourg (“and for keeps this time, damnit!”), tells us, in a post headed “Kash Patel Doesn’t Belong at the FBI”, the following:
The president’s constitutional obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” requires evenhanded action in the national rather than his personal interest, a distinction Donald Trump doesn’t grasp.
Well, duh, John. One might also point out that El Donaldo doesn’t grasp the distinction between executing the laws and breaking them, but apparently your grasp of the situation has yet to extend that far.
John Bolton is one of a fairly large number of men and women who could have done real damage to Donald Trump. Bolton was in Trump’s administration at the time of Trump’s disgraceful shakedown of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He could have provided massively damaging real time testimony of Trump’s criminal behavior at Trump’s first impeachment, testimony that, I believe, would probably not have been overwhelming enough to generate the two-thirds majority in the Senate to achieve Trump’s conviction and removal from office but would have forced perhaps as many as 10 Republican senators to vote against him, including (well, maybe) Mitch McConnell, the man who essentially made Trump president by refusing to allow confirmation of President Obama’s last Supreme Court pick, allowing “moderate” Republicans a “valid” (for them) reason for voting for Trump—to secure a majority on the Court. If a significant number of Republican senators had voted to remove Trump—well, one can dream, can’t one?
But of course Bolton did not testify. He persevered in the code of “omerta” that continues to rule all “good Republicans” even today: never to speak ill of Trump in “real time”. Wait until the crisis is past and then—well, and then wish that, somehow, things could have turned out differently than they did, if only someone—someone else, of course—had taken a stand.
John, you are moral cowardice personified. And let this be your epitaph.
