Posted on 04/10/2024 4:17:46 PM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that former President Donald Trump had “simple-minded ideas about how the world works.”
Bolton said, “I think it’s important to understand, and this is especially important for Trump critics to understand, he doesn’t have a philosophy. He doesn’t think in policy terms, as that’s conventionally understood in Washington. He thinks in anecdotal, ad hoc, transactional terms, seeing through the prism of how does this benefit Donald Trump.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
If Trump is the person God has charged with saving this nation,
I’d sure hate to be Bolton.
The guy is really stuck on Trump, to the point of being more
than a bit absurd.
Sounds good. He can simplify the tax code.
“So, how has this complex view of policy worked out?”
He can’t beat Reagan’s “We win, they lose”.
Bolton and Brennan ought to get together and have an idiot convention like in Young Frankenstein.
Hard to grift a simple world.
Bolton: I mean, four years without a war! Four f-king years! Can you believe that? It’s taken the last four years just to get back to where we were before him. And now he might come back? What a nightmare! How are we supposed to make any mon... How are we supposed to keep America safe like that?
Except under Trump we had a booming economy and peace abroad. Those “simple ideas” worked rather well.
There is an explanation, of course. Reagan and Trump both understood that most decisions have to be made quickly and decisively, as a matter of instinct in many cases. Elaborate policies are the work of bureaucrats like Bolton. Presidents make decisions, and good decisions require that guiding principles be kept in mind and applied quickly and firmly.
In business, Trump was always a bottom line type. How do I make money out of the situation at hand? In politics, Trump's calculus is always how to advance himself. As President, he had a simple rule of decision: how do I advance America's interests? And Trump kept to that as his rule of decision with little reference or respect for Washington's obsession for arcana of policy details and obscure history.
Trump went through complicated problems like a hot knife through butter, while Washington's bureaucrats like Bolton were pondering policies for the design of the knife, how it should be heated, and how it should be wielded. And, a lesser mind than Kissinger, Bolton does not accept that Trump was almost always correct in his key decisions as President.
Sometimes the wonks are so deep in the woods on policy they don’t see the trees. Kissinger would be in that category. I see it at work. People so close to an issue completely miss other views that are clear to others.
Quite so. The writers of policy tend to immerse themselves in a subject and think they know what is best.
We are done with nation builders. I imagine Bolton would also work to replace Assad in Syria, leaving Christians there to the ISIS butchers.
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