Jonathan Chait thinks year one may have been the Golden Age of Trump now that we have the hiring of John Bolton and the firing of H.R. McMaster, recalling that three weeks ago 45* called his departure Fake News.
We have ended the Fake Year. And Mad-Dog Mattis may be Harold II.
That 2017 was a Golden Year may be true, since the rest of the Trump term will be cleaning up the mess and concurrently starting a series of new wars. The GOP loves their MIC spectacles — remember “shock and awe” (no mention of the stretched logistical support of the advance to Baghdad).
Mighty Mango loves the trappings of a presidency and not the actual work, so to him, a signature attack/invasion will create his historical place despite or current war(s), and despite his being the worst US president beyond Buchanan, Pierce, Wilson, G. W. Bush, and Fillmore.
From the outset of his presidency, to which he was elevated with barely any preparation, Donald Trump was surrounded by a protective cordon of advisers, as a child monarch might. In return for absorbing his tantrums, they would educate their unsteady charge, who would wind up, after pratfalls and drama, inflicting no more ruin on the country than a normal modern Republican president might. (Which, to be sure, it quite a bit of ruin). Somehow it seemed we might muddle through.
Now Trump is breaking through the protective cordon. The people who joined the government to save Donald Trump from himself, or to save the world from Trump, are leaving. Gary Cohn and Rex Tillerson are gone. Trump is reorganizing his legal team, mobilizing for war against the special counsel. And now he has finally cast off his most important minder, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and replaced him with John Bolton.
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The great danger of a Trump presidency has never been the things that are the most likely to happen. It has been the tail risks – any number of low-probability, high impact events that are far more likely to occur with an authoritarian buffoon in the White House than under a normal president. Trump has spent his presidency surrounded by people who were at least attempting to contain these risks – say, a Constitutional crisis, or a meltdown of the international order. As awful and comically surreal as the first year and a quarter of his term has been, after Trump has taken full command of his administration, we may see it as a golden age.
nymag.com/...
The Weekly Standard claims that Bolton will be tougher on Russia, which is BS considering Lord Dampnut’s submissiveness to Putin
Bolton’s history suggests a long and storied history of cherry-picking intelligence to support his preferred hawkish policies.
Bolton had been rumored to be the frontrunner for the job for months, but that doesn’t make the pick any less jarring. His track record in government, connections to anti-Muslim groups, and stated views in op-eds and public speeches all suggest that he will push Trump to take extremely dangerous positions on issues like North Korea, Iran, and ISIS.
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Bolton’s elevation illustrates the degree to which the president is influenced by the conservative infotainment sphere, most notably Fox News — where he has long been an on-air fixture. Bolton was, prior to this appointment, a marginal figure in Washington foreign policy circles since his departure from the Bush administration. But he got himself one of the top jobs in the country because of his savvy work in the world of conservative media and advocacy groups.
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Bolton took the hardest of possible lines. He forcefully argued that Iraq had WMDs — “we are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction,” as he put in one 2002 speech. After Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech connecting North Korea, Iraq, and Iran as an “axis of evil,” Bolton insisted that this wasn’t just rhetoric — that there was ‘’a hard connection between these regimes — an ‘axis’ along which flow dangerous weapons and dangerous technology.’’
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John Prados, a fellow at George Washington University’s National Security Archives, came to an even broader conclusion in a study of declassified Bush administration documents: Bolton bears a significant amount of blame for the politicized intelligence used to justify the decision to attack Iraq.
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And in February 2018, he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the US needed to solve the nuclear standoff with North Korea by force.
“Pre-emption opponents argue that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an ‘imminent threat.’ They are wrong,” Bolton wrote.
“It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.”