Trump dumps McMaster for a master of Iraq ‘disaster’
John Bolton, seen here on March 3, is President Donald Trump's third national security adviser in 14 months. Credit: Bloomberg / Andrew Harrer
During the Republican presidential primaries, Donald Trump said he “fought very, very hard” against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Nobody seemed to know how a real-estate heir and TV celebrity was supposed to have put up this stoic battle.
Trump at the time also said something many Americans arrived at long before: “The war in Iraq has been a disaster.”
Now, as president, Trump has hired the very Bush Administration official who made the public case for that “disaster” to become his third national-security adviser in 14 months.
John Bolton, then the UN ambassador, falsely argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that the American role after regime change would be “fairly minimal.”
Sneering at “regime change” during the campaign, Trump said Hussein “was a bad guy . . . but you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good.”
Bolton might or might not agree Hussein was great at killing terrorists as opposed to being one. That’s moot. What’s striking is the disconnect between Bolton’s resume and what Trump ran on.
Trump advisers such as Steve Bannon and those on the libertarian right railed against neoconservatives — a movement begun by “liberal” hawks disenchanted with the Democrats.
During the general election campaign, the Trump team made Hillary Clinton out to be something of a neocon hawk herself. Democrats who backed Bernie Sanders agreed.
The president, however, seems to see no need to reconcile all that with the fact that Bolton is steeped in Washington’s undrained swamp and a proud neoconservative.
But enough about inconsistency. The Trump foreign policy, if coherent enough to be called that, is already steeped in contradiction.
Bolton may turn out to fit right in. Then again, in Trump’s administration, nobody knows how long anyone will last or what kind of influence they will wield.
On the matter of campaigns and elections, Bolton is already an established ally of the administration.
The Guardian reported Friday that Bolton “collaborated with the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica on an experiment to target YouTube videos to different psychographic profiles of US voters.”
Cambridge is the scandal-rocked firm partly funded by the Mercer family in Suffolk, for whom Bannon carried out projects that preceded the 2016 campaign.
Bolton has a political committee known as the John Bolton Super PAC. According to the New York Times, the committee first hired Cambridge in 2014 at a time it was harvesting Facebook data.
Hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer gave $5 million to the Bolton committee, its largest donor, according to election filings cited by the Washington Post.
Bolton’s name has been mentioned in Trump circles since the transition and long before Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster became national security adviser to succeed the now-indicted Gen. Michael Flynn.
White House sources told the Times that Trump didn’t hire Bolton earlier because he disliked the ex-diplomat’s walrus-like mustache.
That sounds silly, but perhaps plausible.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
