Bolton Exits, But It’s Still Trump’s Show
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
President Donald Trump and his now former national security adviser, John Bolton, have had their differences. From North Korea to Iran, the two have been at odds with one another on some of the most important foreign policy decisions. That tension boiled over with the president tweeting, "I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning." Bolton responded quickly saying, "I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’ "
Whatever the case, again there’s a hole waiting to be filled on Trump’s national security team. What happened that pushed Trump’s fight with Bolton over the edge? And what does it mean that Trump is now 0–3 on national security advisers?
Guest: Shane Harris, intelligence and national security reporter for the Washington Post
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When I think about National Security Advisor John Bolton and President Trump, I think of that old Neil Simon play, the odd couple. |
| 0:14.3 | One's a neat nick. The other's a slob. And they're roommates. |
| 0:18.8 | Like Trump walks out in Bolton's office is a mess. |
| 0:23.9 | He's like, why don't you clean this up? |
| 0:26.1 | Right, exactly. |
| 0:27.1 | Yes, an Oscar and Felix situation. |
| 0:30.2 | Shane Harris reports on national security for the Washington Post. |
| 0:34.3 | He says, I'm actually not that far off when I imagine these two as their roommates from |
| 0:38.3 | hell. The president's approach to foreign policy can seem chaotic. His national security |
| 0:44.0 | advisor on the other hand. The one he just fired, he's orderly, controlled. Are you surprised |
| 0:50.7 | that he's out? Not at all. No. I mean, I think that this relationship, it just |
| 0:56.7 | seemed doomed from the start. I mean, it very much was an odd couple situation. I mean, |
| 1:01.1 | to the point where the president didn't even really make any pretense about that. I mean, |
| 1:05.7 | he joked about how he didn't like John Bolton's mustache, and this is one of the things that |
| 1:09.9 | turned him down, turned him off the last |
| 1:11.9 | time he was thinking about him for the job. So personality-wise, this was not really a good fit. |
| 1:18.2 | But Shane says there's something else. Well, there were stories about Bolton, like literally |
| 1:23.3 | having his door closed at some times, which I think is sort of an apt metaphor for the way he tended to run the National Security Council, which is he just sort of locked himself away in his office and really didn't communicate very much and tried to run it sort of at this kind of centralized base of power. |
| 1:40.3 | This is the opposite of what a national security advisor is supposed to do. |
| 1:44.9 | Chain compares the job to leading an orchestra. |
| 1:47.3 | It's all about connecting different agencies, listening to different constituencies. |
| 1:52.4 | Bolton just didn't do that. |
... |
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