David A. Graham: The White House’s impossible job

Then there was Tucker Carlson, a figure without precedent in American politics. On the June 21 broadcast of Carlson’s show, just as Bolton was urging a military response to Iran, Carlson devoted a long segment to comparing Bolton to a “tapeworm” that had infested the Republican security establishment and that now was feasting on the ample guts of Trump himself. Carlson has reportedly served as an informal adviser to Trump, and his show sometimes seems intended for an audience of one (the occupant of the Oval Office). Days after that show, when Bolton was packing his bags for Mongolia, Carlson accompanied Trump to Korea. By all evidence, the president preferred his advice to the advice he was getting in-house.

The question I asked at the time—how long can Bolton put up with this?—now has an answer. “I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration,” Trump tweeted after firing Bolton and before thanking him for his service. Bolton, in his own tweet minutes later, sounded stunned: “I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow’”—implying that Trump’s tweet amounted to saying, “You can’t quit—you’re fired!” (No doubt the dispute about whether Bolton was fired or quit voluntarily will affect Bolton’s COBRA coverage. But that is a matter for White House HR.)

Because Bolton has expressed himself with such pungency and clarity over the course of decades in public life, we know what he thinks, and it is easy to discern the nature of his disagreements with the president. Bolton thinks that self-described enemies of the United States—especially nuclear proliferators such as North Korea and Iran—should be punished, rather than rewarded; that friendship with such regimes is dangerous and dishonorable; and that willingness to project American military force is a necessary precondition of lasting peace. Trump, we now know definitively, disagrees with each of these propositions. He will happily strike deals, and his proposed move in North Korea is to lure Kim with visions of condominiums and resorts overlooking the Yellow Sea.

Earlier this year I wrote a profile of Bolton. In my interviews with him, he sometimes prefaced a statement with “The president thinks,” or “It’s the president’s view that.” This preamble, I came to understand, most often meant that Bolton was about to say something that he personally thought was nonsense. “It’s the president’s view that he will meet with anyone, at any time,” Bolton once told me, poker-faced. Indeed, Trump was willing, until the last minute, to meet with the Taliban at Camp David, on the eve of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. He has met with Kim twice. Trump’s willingness to hold talks may or may not be wise, but there is little doubt that Bolton considers it comically naive. He would prefer that Trump line up the world’s dirtbag dictators and read them a riot act for a new century, with a guarantee of humiliation and ruin for anyone who defies America and its allies. This riot act would not mention luxury condos.