The Bolton hullabaloo is just silly
The press is going bonkers over the exit of President Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton.
"Trump unplugged," the New York Times blared, arguing that Trump was going to be his own national security adviser, and now things will get really crazy because the NSC job will no longer be important.
No, nothing's gonna change, the New York Post argued, quite possibly closer to the truth.
Trump's new national security adviser will be his fourth, a CNN kicker read.
Chaos, argued Axios.
And don't even get into the he-said, she-said of whether Trump fired him or whether Bolton resigned. The media are trying to pick that apart like entrails and gauge its meaning in a sad bid to support their theories.
In all likelihood, given what we know about Bolton and Trump, it simply wasn't the right job for Bolton to be in.
Bolton's a good guy; we've never heard a bad word about him. He's never been implicated in corruption like so many of the Obama officials, and he's never gone RINO on us or insulted us. He's just a policy guy, and Trump is a businessman, very entrepreneurial in temperament, very open to trying new things. This would explain the flap over the Taliban meeting, and, for that matter, the flap over the Venezuela meetings with the likes of Diosdado Cabello, whom I wrote about here. Someone leaked those things to squelch them, and since it's likely Bolton was against both, one wonders if maybe it was a Bolton leak that did Bolton in. If so, it would be in character for a policy guy like Bolton, the name of whose game is to get one's policy through via bureaucratic infighting.
He couldn't be more different from secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who, like Trump, has run a business from the top and, again like Trump, has a good head for seeing the big picture, as well as operating very directly with minimum of sleight of hand. (Trump could actually use two of him.)
Just a different kind of person, nothing utterly wrong with either, and no, leaving the service of Trump is not necessarily disastrous for Bolton if he was not the right person for the job. One can't always be disagreeing with the boss and expect to have a good time of it. Plus, Trump probably isn't all that easy to work for, given that he can shift focus and change his mind fairly quickly.
Reading too much into this is absurd. Bolton will land on his feet, and Trump will get a new NSC chief with views that are closer to his own. This is far from chaos in the Trump administration; this is a fast-moving system correcting itself.
Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.