(THREAD) I'm reading John Bolton's book The Room Where It Happened, and in this thread I'll tell you a lot about it so you won't have to buy or read it. I'll also discuss the larger problems with coverage of Trump that the book's content raises. I hope you'll read on and RETWEET. 
DISCLOSURE1/ The last year has proven Bolton a coward, a fraud, disloyal to America, and unworthy of respect. He had a chance to aid his country, and sought a cash-grab instead. Now he may face criminal charges. I write this review as objectively as I can under the circumstances.
DISCLOSURE2/ Yes, I've also written a book on many of the topics Bolton has written about here. It's called Proof of Corruption and comes out in September. Is it a much better book than this? Yes, for many reasons. But again, I seek to be as objective about this book as I can be.
1/ The Room Where It Happened is both breaktakingly self-centered and shockingly narrow—especially for a book of its length. Bolton will disclose every time Kushner called him without giving a single centimeter of page space to what he thought of Jared's "Middle East peace plan."
2/ I have not finished the book, so maybe I'll be surprised. But Bolton has already mentioned the plan multiple times without discussing its merits—while giving us much minutiae about Kushner—and it's clear that it's not a narrative technique but a very specific personal failing.
3/ To underline what personal failing I mean, I'll give another bizarre fact about the book: Bolton gives a tick-tock of withdrawing from Syria before he's given any indication he knows what the consequences of the decision would be. Because the book isn't for you—it's for *him*.
4/ This book *begins* from the premise that Bolton is right—about everything, really—and always has been, and that the great crime of his existence thus far has been that too often (but not always, he'd hasten to add!) his genius has gone unrecognized for the historic gift it is.
5/ To Bolton, Kushner's "Middle East peace plan" is immaterial, for the simple fact that Bolton didn't take it—or Kushner—seriously. And because the book is for *him*, not you, he won't explain the *dangerous plan* a neophyte with POTUS' ear had for an entire region of the world.
6/ Just so, withdrawing from Syria meant—as we've now all seen—the attempted genocide of non-combatant Kurdish men, women, and children. It meant between 10,000 and 30,000 ISIS fighters escaping Syrian prisons. But Bolton wanted Trump to focus on Iran, not Syria, so there you go.
7/ Bolton's *vanity*—Olympian; a bullet through the heart of any text he composes—not only obscures the very geopolitics he means to discuss but (worse) *misleads* readers. And he doesn't even do it—though he does do other things—for political reasons. He just can't help himself.
8/ So for example, as I know from writing a Trump book not in the first person, that isn't a memoir, and that's actually about geopolitics, when you write about—say—Rex Tillerson's downfall at State, you don't self-aggrandizingly turn it into Vanderpump Rules. You tell the truth.
9/ In Bolton's telling, Rex Tillerson's leadership style—which Bolton felt entitled to judge, despite having had less leadership experience than Tillerson—caused his termination, *not* Tillerson angering Trump's Saudi and Emirati allies by opposing their ground invasion of Qatar.
10/ Because Bolton had no window into Trump's dealings with the Saudis and Emiratis during Tillerson's reign at State, those dealings... simply *didn't exist* to him. Which freed him to congratulate himself for having seen Tillerson's leadership weaknesses before anyone else did.
11/ Here's the first spot I want to pause, so I can note that this isn't wholly Bolton's fault. It's media's fault. And publishing's. Because media covers—and therefore publishers flock to publish—*newsmakers*, rather than *authors*. *Newsmakers* always write in the first person.
12/ Bolton was given a huge advance *because* he's Bolton—not because he was going to write a good book. And his publisher knew the book would be *covered by media*—and therefore make money—*because*, again, Bolton. So of *course* he fetishized his stupid, blinkered perceptions.
13/ But here's where I really *must* find Bolton exclusively responsible: for the arrogance that led him to miss even signals he was being sent *at the time*. Let's take Tillerson's firing as an example, as it dominates an early part of the book, before the focus moves to Mattis.
14/ Though the conversations are recounted in the book, Bolton seems not to clock that Trump's complaints about Tillerson had to do with the Middle East and policies the Saudis had their hands in—nothing traceable to the management issues Bolton self-aggrandizingly obsesses over.
15/ So why does Bolton focus on Tillerson's management style—a yawningly dull topic—not the fact that foreign nationals got a Secretary of State fired? Because Bolton is still pissed—the book makes it clear—Tillerson was hired over him. Bolton had thought he'd be a better leader.
16/ But the price—here and elsewhere in the book—isn't just the context for a key event, or (small thing) the *truth* of any event, but rather something more insidious: the book *forgives* Trump, even *exonerates* him, of anything Trump did that Bolton thought beneath his notice.
17/ So what's beneath Bolton's notice, in a nearly 600-page book that recounts seemingly every day of his life and every call or meeting he ever had?
Well, basically anything that wasn't part of Bolton's Prime Directive: proving himself correct and exerting his will over others.
Well, basically anything that wasn't part of Bolton's Prime Directive: proving himself correct and exerting his will over others.
18/ Early on, Kushner and Bannon and Kelly are trying to give Bolton a job, and Bolton arrogantly says there are only two he'll accept. When they offer him the number-two spot at State, he proudly cops to a bizarre response: you can't run State from the deputy position. Uh, what?
19/ It's hard to explain how Bolton manages to do it—the dramatic irony is heavy with this one—but though he recounts the whole exchange, he also betrays *no understanding* that they *didn't want him to run State* and *explicitly* were *not* giving him that option. He's clueless.
20/ As a reader, you think it's a fluke, but then, when they're trying to make him a Special Assistant to the President and he again arrogantly refuses, he *again* says, essentially, you can't run the whole apparatus from that position. And it's like—dude—please take a damn hint!
21/ What one discovers, quickly enough, is that Bolton is a legitimately dangerous narcissist. No wonder he writes, without any apparent irony, that Trump kept telling him, "you and I are a lot alike!" Bolton—I kid you not—takes this as a compliment. Because: textbook narcissist.
22/ To give you a sense of why I call Bolton dangerous and—indeed—deranged, he somehow, incredibly, wanted to send our soldiers into harm's way in *both* North Korea and Iran, apparently simultaneously, while *arrogantly* expressing the *exact* same wrong thinking he had on Iraq.
23/ Imagine—for a moment—that you had supported a war over *nothing* in Iraq that killed tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of thousands of civilians. You've had years to have nightmares about the consequences of your bad judgment. Instead? You seek *Round 2* and *Round 3*.
24/ But he's not just aggressively delusional about geopolitics—and, not for nothing, consistently wrong, despite "expertise"—he writes his book amidst as grandiose a self-delusion as could be imagined. Here I take his backroom machinations to get a job as adequate for-instance:
25/ Bolton manages to give all the embarrassing details—that he doesn't seem to register as embarrassing—about his desperate efforts to stab Tillerson and McMaster in the back and steal their jobs, while *also* trying to convince us the White House was desperately courting *him*.
26/ That he at first fails to get *any* White House job is *the* topic of the first 50 pages. He explains it—in verbose fashion—50 different ways: I turned them down; they had outside pressure; they worried I couldn't be confirmed; they were disorganized; they told me to "wait."
27/ This man—who's been wrong about everything, is known for being impossible to work with and is ideologically scary—has convinced himself, and tries to convince us, that White House insiders *planned* having him come in once things settled down. That's why they didn't hire him.
28/ The most telling thing is that he spends *so much* of the book's early sections telling us he understands a public servant serves a POTUS and not vice versa, but *accepted a job* in an administration where he had *no interest* in the president's agenda and opposed most of it.
29/ Indeed, one of the least convincing refrains in the early going is that he and Trump were somehow aligned, when Bolton *famously* wants to make war on *everyone*—and Trump's game is to cede territory and interests and influence to *anyone* who will pay the Trump Organization.
30/ This is why I say that, early on, the reader has so many reasons to doubt Bolton's values, judgment, ability to perceive, and authorial ethos that it's difficult to take anything he says seriously. So does this mean that Bolton is also a *liar*? No—I don't think that it does.
31/ The problem with the book isn't what Trump *wishes* it was—that Bolton comes across as a liar. He doesn't. Rather (as noted) he self-portrays as an impeccable observer of his own genius, which means you trust his recollections in any conversation *where he has been centered*.
32/ In other words, in the high-stakes conversations Bolton has with Trump, one senses Bolton is largely recounting the major strokes—likely using copious notes—accurately (a feeling one never has with Bannon—who both Wolff and Woodward relied on to the detriment of their books).
33/ Bolton not being a liar doesn't mean his words can be trusted, as of course there's the other bugbear: partisanship. Bolton is so radical that when he says—falsely—that left-wing commentators are apologists for Assad's use of chemical weapons, you believe that he believes it.
34/ On the other hand, Bolton takes himself so seriously—it wouldn't be possible to take yourself *more* seriously—that there's *very* little frivolous content in the book. As I mentioned, one doesn't sense that Bolton is playing to the crowd here. Rather, he's thinking out loud.
35/ So for instance, when Bolton tells a *shocking* anecdote about Tillerson calling Haley a "c**t" at a public function—a story Bolton hears from Trump—you really *do* sense that Bolton is telling it because he strongly suspects Trump made the story up and wonders why he did so.
36/ Unfortunately, as Bolton is minimally reflexive or insightful, these moments pass like you're reading them in a dictionary. Again, Bolton doesn't have the range of knowledge or interest in context to note that Trump *also* found a way to call Obama a n****r via an "anecdote."
37/ (For those who don't recall, Trump used a made-up story about Putin calling Obama a racial slur as a cover to use the term to describe Obama. He appears to have done the same with Haley. But the next sentence in Bolton's book—post-anecdote—is about a Macron call. Seriously.)
38/ This is why I call the book shockingly narrow in scope, given its length and topic. Bolton never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity to see the big picture—even as he's constantly discussing the big picture—because he doesn't realize his only big picture is himself.
39/ In short, media and publishing fail to distinguish between political *memoirs*—which are usually solipsistic and make news only accidentally (maybe a handful of times per book)—and political *histories*, which are content-forward rather than focusing on characters and scenes.
40/ As political book news in this century largely focuses on a handful of "reveals" disseminated by reporters rather than critics, a *memoir* can be wrongly made to *seem* like a content-forward book. That said, this book has more reveals than normal—but you must hunt for them.
41/ For instance, the revelation that Trump said he doesn't like the Kurdsm and the strange glee he seems to get discussing them fleeing, is *only a reveal* if a reader knows—and Bolton certainly won't say!—that Trump, with Bolton's indirect aid, later green-lit *their genocide*.
42/ By the same token, Bolton's casual misogyny—he has no respect for Haley or Melania despite both being at least as intelligent (almost certainly more so) than Trump—maybe is what gets us Trump's Haley "anecdote," but it's only gossip unless you've way more context about Haley.
43/ Then there's the *other* way that reveals are hidden: because they're based in dramatic irony. For instance, that Trump's former NSA was telling him Syria was a "strategic sideshow" *is* a stunning reveal...of how dangerous Bolton was. But is Bolton the one to point that out?
44/ Bolton is—besides a casual misogynist and the other things I said—a bureaucrat whose errors killed hundreds of thousands. That he could only see that Trump's hesitation over Syria as an obstacle—not a sign Trump is compromised by whatever his thing with Putin is—is harrowing.
45/ Indeed, that John Bolton makes a strong case that *all* Trump's decisions were prompted by not wanting to anger autocrats he worshipped and wanted to do business with appears to be *beyond Bolton's awareness* until *much* deeper into a book than many will be willing to read.
46/ I'm almost done, but the idea of Bolton as an elitist, narcissistic bureaucrat who's oblivious to his own radicalism or the consequences of his actions puts me in mind of something else I need to say: beware of books by people who've been embedded in DC privilege for decades.
47/ What's wrong with this sentence: "On Wednesday, March 21, my cell phone rang as I was riding down a snowy George Washington Memorial Parkway to do an interview at Fox's DC studio." Bolton gets this call when he's not at the White House yet. So what word jumps out at you here?
48/ For me, it's the word "riding." What I take from it is that Bolton was being *chauffeured* down George Washington Memorial Parkway. Not because he had a White House security detail—he didn't—but because he's rich, entitled, and one of America's crazy, dangerous power brokers.
49/ I've written as many or more words by age 43 as Bolton had by age 43, and every word I write is undergirded by my values. Those values come from being a public defender, journalist, and teacher. I built *up* from my values; Bolton works *down* from how he wants power divided.
50/ Bolton's book is immoral, self-indulgent, blinkered, and embarrassing. I find it fascinating because I'm a policy wonk and—however fatally flawed—Bolton offers a guilty pleasure. I find it hard to see why anyone without my affliction would need more than a summary of reveals.
PS/ You won't find many longtime authors who relish—or are interested in—telling folks not to read a book. So my view—of course—is read it if you like. Just know what you're getting into, and understand that if you just want the "reveals," the major papers already published them.
PS2/ I'd meant to add "if you don't want to" at the end of the first sentence in this thread. I'm serious, and I regret not including those words. Because as I said, some—and that includes me—may yet find this an interesting character study with *occasional* geopolitical nuggets.
