The good news first: Jared Kushner will not be replacing HR McMaster as Donald Trump’s third national security adviser. Nor will the clueless education secretary, Betsy DeVos. But that is about the only ray of sunshine surrounding Trump’s anointing former UN ambassador John Bolton and his Neville Chamberlain moustache.



The explosive Bolton – who is the kind of uber-hawk who will always choose conflict over conciliation – now steps into the most important national security job in government that does not require Senate confirmation.

Granted, it is possible to derive a glimmer of I-told-you-so satisfaction from the total collapse of the establishment theory that a race of bemedaled generals and oil-industry titans could contain Trump. In truth, we now confront the frightening image of Trump Unchained, like a fugitive from a low-rent 1960s movie about Hercules.

All signs from the White House suggest that Trump is going to war on multiple fronts. The Bolton bombshell came just hours after the president’s lead attorney, the often conciliatory John Dowd, resigned in frustration over Trump’s brass-knuckle attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller.

If Trump fires Mueller it would, of course, prompt the biggest constitutional crisis since Watergate. But, at least, on the Mueller front, no nuclear weapons would be launched, except as over-wrought metaphors.

Alas, Bolton as national security adviser would come equipped with a war-fighting capacity that goes far beyond mere words. Nothing is more chilling than the argument for attacking North Korea that Bolton sketched out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed just a few weeks ago: “The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times.”

Bolton’s why-we-can’t-wait approach might have been justified when Nikita Khrushchev was moving Soviet missiles into Cuba. But Bolton, who was a zealot about Saddam Hussein’s supposedly fearsome arsenal, is now hyperventilating over a brutal, but tin-pot, despot who appears to be reaching a modus vivendi with South Korean president Moon Jae-in.



Maybe if the 69-year-old Bolton had served in the military (he supported the Vietnam war from afar ... at Yale Law School), he might have learned that so-called surgical strikes can quickly degenerate into bloody messes. Instead, it is easy to imagine Bolton pressing for military action against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela all in one go.

George W Bush had his Axis of Evil. Bolton comes into the White House with his own Axis of Impatience.

In prior administrations, national security advisers like Condoleezza Rice regarded themselves as honest brokers between dueling factions in the cabinet. The only thing honest about Bolton is his ill-concealed contempt for traditional diplomacy. In late 2015, Bolton proposed in the Boston Globe that all future US contributions to the UN should be voluntary, depending entirely on the national mood.

With Marco Rubio, the Senate’s version of a human weathervane, praising Bolton as “an excellent choice”, not even the terminally naive expect Republicans in Congress to limit Trump’s militaristic impulses. A brave bipartisan Senate effort this week to challenge the brutal and legally dicey war in Yemen mustered only 44 votes.

I recently asked a senior congressional Republican why Congress is so willing to defer to Trump’s clownish foreign policy antics. The honest response: “Most of them feel like they don’t know enough.”

The only presidential parallel to Trump is Millard Fillmore, who tried to regain the White House in 1856 as the nominee of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party. Trump came into office as the Know-Nothing president and, as his self-confidence has risen, his knowledge base has increasingly been limited to the truth according to Fox News commentators like John Bolton.

It is time to pity the permanent staff of the White House, who constantly have to shuffle offices like desk clerks at a hot sheet motel. But maybe it no longer matters who is advising Trump. Caught up in his own fantasy world of unappreciated greatness, the 45th president is prepared to serve as his own chief of staff, national security adviser, press secretary, political director and White House counsel.



Anything left over is for Jared and Ivanka.

As for Bolton, he was the wild man in George W Bush’s tragically misguided, but sane, administration. Under Trump, though, he may end up as the sanest man in the Land of the Crazy.