From Stormy Daniels to John Bolton, will America ever recover from Donald Trump? By electing Trump and tolerating Bolton, America has shown it is not a trustworthy steward of the free world. The damage gets deeper by the day.

Tom Nichols | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Trump picks John Bolton to replace McMaster as national security adviser President Donald Trump selected John Bolton to replace H.R. McMaster as National Security Adviser. Here is a look at Bolton's background.

From Stormy Daniels to John Bolton, the United States of America will not recover from the presidency of Donald Trump.

This is a bold statement, and in a literal sense, it is not true. The United States will exist long after President Trump either steps down after two terms, is defeated for re-election, or is otherwise removed from office.

But as a global superpower and the leader of an alliance of free nations, America will not soon — if ever — recover the same position of leadership it has occupied since the end of World War II. Bolton’s arrival is a harbinger not of war but of further chaos. He will be in a job no one wanted and for which he was chosen because of his repeated appearances on the president’s only pipeline to reality, Fox News.

Like much of Washington, Bolton himself seemed taken aback by the news — although this was an obvious call that the Trump administration has been telegraphing for weeks. Overseas, our allies are maintaining a polite silence, because Bolton will be personal staff to the president. But it is hard to imagine that they think the accession of a man of almost cartoonishly hawkish views is a good sign for U.S. foreign policy.

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Bolton alone cannot destroy American foreign policy. Neither can Trump, who is hardly the first flawed president. Richard Nixon threatened the Constitution and was driven from office. Bill Clinton subjected us to national moral embarrassment. George W. Bush squandered the international goodwill engendered by the tragedy of 9/11 by expanding a just war in Afghanistan into a fiasco in Iraq. Barack Obama, in a single-minded pursuit of a legacy with Iran, removed the United States from vital positions of power in Europe and the Middle East, and outsourced global security to China and Russia.

And yet, all of these were recoverable errors. Clinton was a passable president, a centrist in domestic affairs and a committed leader of the NATO alliance. Bush reassured a terrified nation, and his errors, in hindsight, seem less nefarious than incompetent. Obama is a decent man who did what his voters asked him to do, even when it was wrong.

In earlier days, we elected a haberdasher and an actor to the Oval Office, and both turned out to be great presidents. A callow playboy from Boston faced down a major nuclear threat from the Soviet Union. Even Nixon’s undeniable accomplishments in foreign affairs gave his eventual downfall a certain tragic grandeur.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world regarded the United States with a mixture of awe and condescension. We were sneered at by European intellectuals, secretly envied by communist apparatchiks, and hated by less developed nations who resented our incredible wealth. But friends and enemies both had to accept that America was a serious nation, run by serious people who always rose to the obligations of global leadership.

Donald Trump is different. The 45th president has shown himself to be utterly unserious about foreign affairs. In just the past few weeks, he has lied to the Canadian prime minister (or lied about lying, it is now unclear) and suggested, yet again, that America might abandon allies who don’t ante up their protection money. He has impulsively thrown out offers to meet with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, and sent the market plunging at the prospect of international trade wars.

Now, having rid himself of his meddlesome priest, the too-serious national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Trump has brought aboard a man who will insist on speaking his mind at will, much as the president does, and this will only make matters worse.

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All of this reveals a great shift in American politics. By electing Trump and tolerating Bolton, we have shown that we are not a nation that can be consistently trusted with the stewardship of the free world. It’s not that Trump, in the end, will collapse NATO, plunge us into a great depression, or start World War III — although with Bolton by his side he is capable of doing all of those things — but rather that the American voters have shown the world that we are capable of astonishing selfishness and petulance. We have abandoned our civic virtue not just at home but also overseas, and once lost, that position cannot be recovered.

Perhaps this is all too pessimistic. Americans have elected men of weak moral character and shallow political commitment to office before. But not when it mattered so much, and certainly not since the advent of the era in which the president of United States — the sole steward of an arsenal of weapons that can extinguish civilization itself — became the leader and protector not only of millions of his own citizens, but of the billions of others who rely on America as a friend and ally.

The most optimistic outcome is that decades from now, the memory of the Trump years fades away, and both we and the world look upon this period as an aberration, a kind of fever or temporary insanity from which we awoke just before we lost any possibility of an American restoration. But the damage is getting deeper by the day.

Healing it will take more than just electing a new president: It will require years of painful self-examination, and calling ourselves to account honestly and transparently. Only then will we begin to earn back the presumption of trust and leadership that was once one of our proudest achievements as a free nation.

Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of The Death of Expertise. The views expressed here are solely his own. Follow him on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom.