Bolton's departure “tells us something about Donald Trump,” TAFrank writes: “He seems less uneasy than many presidents about backing down once in a while”
that he was going to be “changing out people” all over the place. As a rule, someone who’s a consummate backroom operator succeeds at it rather than getting fired.
All of this tells us something about Donald Trump—nothing new, but something valuable all the same. The worry when he came into office was that Trump would order the bombing of some country whose leader insulted Trump’s hair, but the reality is that he seems less uneasy than many presidents about backing down once in a while. One of Trump’s more curious contradictions, one that keeps throwing off many people, including me, is that he is insanely thin-skinned, yet also oddly self-assured.
We’re also reminded that Trump, for all his outbursts and ill-judged insults, maintains a semifunctional sense of when to put rudeness aside, even erring on the side of sycophancy in some of his meetings with unsavory foreign leaders. This is in sharp contrast to Bolton, who seems incapable of courtesy, except in small doses. Rude people often get an undeserved reputation for smarts, as if the man who “”—a cliché that has trailed Bolton for decades—must get that way by sheer brilliance.
As we mark the 18th anniversary of 9/11, we can look back on how much that horrible day empowered people like Bolton, one of many unfortunate ideologues in government at the time. The taunt from al-Qaida was that the United States was weak, that we would run from any real conflict at the first sight of blood, that we would always blink.
Presidents always have a Bolton-like voice whispering in their ear that a failure to launch a missile or send in the troops will destroy the credibility of the United States. Fortunately Donald Trump seems able to silence it a lot of the time.that he always asked the same question any time someone told him he would look weak in the face of a foreign adversary: “Can we kill ’em tomorrow?” While an affirmative answer didn’t mean the threat was illusory, it did clarify the differential in power.
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