Donald Trump cashiered retired General H.R. McMaster from his job as national security advisor, and replaced him with neo-con firebrand, John Bolton, who formerly served as U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, an organization he has nothing but disdain for.
Bolton, with his outsized ego and his tendency to bully is more in the image of the kind of person Trump is happy to have around—but for a few things. One, he does have a large ego, and No. 45 doesn’t like to share the limelight with anyone, witness how he treats his VP, and how he dissed Rex Tillerson before he canned him. Up till now, Trump has appeared reluctant to get rid of the military and former military people on his staff. Like a lot of people who have never served, he idolizes senior military people. But, for reasons probably known only to him, he dumped McMaster.
That alone should give Bolton pause. The other thing that could make his a short tenure is his hard line attitude toward Russia. Trump has this odd love affair with Russia, or at least with Putin, so it’ll be interesting to see how he deals with Bolton’s broadsides at his enemy, the evil Russians, because frankly I doubt he’ll be able to control his verbal outbursts any more than Trump can control his tweets.
Stay tuned, folks. The national security advisor job could end up being the nightly entertainment—a game of political musical chairs.