John Bolton's "The Room Where It Happened" has landed.
It seemed pointless to read reviews by Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times and Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. Revelations in the book about Donald Trump's corruption, mental instability and cozying up to dictators had already appeared in The Times and WSJ's news columns. Why waste any time reading the book?
Despite Trump's lawsuit against release of his former national security adviser's White House expose, the WSJ published an excerpt in its Saturday Review section. Although the WSJ's editorial page frequently defends Trump, albeit turning against him more and more recently, Rupert Murdoch's newspaper disclosed some of Bolton's most damaging accusations about Trump's dealings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Trump responded to the book's arrival with his usual fulminations, claiming that Bolton is one more enemy who should be thrown into Trump's fantasy jail.
Slate's Fred Kaplan said that Bolton's own foolhardy views disclosed in the book are as disturbing as the Trump vignettes. Bolton shows himself as more extreme than Trump on Iran and North Korea, Kaplan said.
Kaplan cites a passage from the book that pictures Trump as having the attention span of a 2-year-old. Trump's unable to focus on one subject, continually veering off to pursue bizarre associations in his mind.
Kaplan's piece made me wonder if Lin-Manuel Miranda can take action against Bolton for appropriating the"room where it happens" lyric from Miranda's smash musical "Hamilton."
It sounds like Bolton's memoir should have been called "the room where it didn't happen."
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