Opinion: John Bolton’s humiliation tour
National security adviser John Bolton speaks during a briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House on Jan. 28. By James Downie James Downie Digital opinions editor Email Bio Follow Opinions editor March 4 at 10:12 AM Before John Bolton entered the Trump White House as national security adviser, he had a lucrative career as hawk-on-demand for Fox News and groups seeking public speakers. To the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, confrontation was always the answer.
For these reliably warmongering views, Bolton was drawing an annual salary of $569,000 from Fox by the time he joined the White House, plus nearly $750,000 in speaking fees thanks to his Fox-boosted fame. Indeed, it was this Fox perch that in part drew President Trump’s eye and brought Bolton to the prominent national security policymaking role he always craved.
Sunday morning, Bolton guested on both “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “State of the Union” to defend Trump’s failed summit in Hanoi with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Naturally, both Chris Wallace of Fox and Jake Tapper of CNN asked Bolton about the president’s assertion that Kim knew nothing about the fatal treatment of American student Otto Warmbier.
Bolton’s defense on Fox was to change the definition of “taking someone at their word.” “When he says, ‘I’m going to take him at his word,’ it doesn’t mean that he accepted it as reality,” he told Wallace. “It means that he accepts that’s what Kim Jong Un said.” One could tell Bolton didn’t believe those words even as he was uttering them.
Last week, Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen warned Republicans on the House Oversight Committee that those selling themselves to the Trump cause would end up like him: humiliating themselves with “silliness.” Anyone who works for a president will at times have to defend policies that they disagree with.
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