Looks like Donald Trump is going to turn the John Bolton thing into a loss for himself after all
John Bolton’s anti-Trump tell all book is finally coming out next week, long after most people have lost interest. Bolton alienated mainstream Americans by refusing to testify during the impeachment process, because he wanted to save all the “good stuff” for his book. That’s backfired on him, and sales are now expected to be a small fraction of what they could have been – meaning that even if the revelations in the book are serious, the damage to Trump should be comparatively small.
Except that Donald Trump has never met a victory he couldn’t turn into a loss, or a small loss that he couldn’t turn into a bigger loss, of course. The New York Times now says that the Trump White House is planning a big push this week to smear John Bolton and push back against whatever is in his book. This is really stupid. No one wants to hear what Bolton has to say, yet the White House is going to blow this up and make sure that Bolton gets a media platform for his revelations anyway. This comes even as Trump blurted out today that every conversation he’s ever had is somehow classified.
Of course this isn’t a surprise. Donald Trump just can’t let these kinds of things go. He’s instructing the White House to push back against John Bolton, even though it’s a bad strategy, because he wants revenge. But Trump has a habit of helping out his adversaries while trying to seek revenge against them. Looks like he’s about to do it again. We’re still not going to buy Bolton’s book, but if the revelations in it hurt Trump, so be it.
