Chronic. Are there still things we don't know about Donald Trump's ignorance about the rest of the world? Apparently yes, since a few pearls from the Memoirs of his ex-national security adviser John Bolton made, thanks to skilfully orchestrated leaks before their publication, Tuesday, June 23, the delights of the anti-Trump media.
The Washington establishment was delighted to read, by way of teaser, that the President of the United States had asked British Prime Minister Theresa May if the United Kingdom was a nuclear power.
If revenge is a dish that can be eaten cold, John Bolton likes it lukewarm. The publication of his book, The Room Where it Happened (Simon & Schuster, 952 pages, € 31) "the room where it happened", not translated) less than eight months after his shattering departure from the White House, allows him to settle his accounts in a bloody manner, failing that to be glorious, with the President of the United States and his coterie.
No one comes out grown – no more the author than the president – of this story, detailed with the thoroughness of a note-taker, the woes of American diplomacy, from April 2018 to September 2019, the period during which Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, has been a regular witness to the Oval Office.
Banana republic
When we know that this president welcomed his counterparts from the three Baltic republics two years ago thinking that they came from the former Yugoslavia because he confused the Baltics and the Balkans, read in the pen of Bolton that he believed also that finland was part of russia has a sad air of deja vu.
And it is another part of Bolton's story that more seriously shocked certain American minds: the description of conversations with the great autocrats of this world, the Chinese Xi Jinping, the Turkish Recep Tayyip Erdogan, where the President of the United States offer – or demand – favors to secure their good graces, or even negotiate an advantage likely to favor his re-election. This evocation of the first world power treated as a banana republic will make any normally constituted citizen blush.
For European readers, the real revelation is elsewhere. It is in the reports of bilateral meetings and international summits that brought together President Trump and his allies across the Atlantic. The anecdotes were known, the systematic hostility towards Angela Merkel, the rascality with Emmanuel Macron, the anger at Justin Trudeau, all this was reported, on condition of anonymity, by dumbfounded European interlocutors.
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