The world is clearly spinning off its axis when Politico is questioning whether John Bolton has become a “hero of the Resistance.”
The
reason is that as President Trump’s national security adviser, he
“raised alarms about the politically questionable role informal actors
were playing in shaping U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine.”
Whether
people like Bolton, who clearly disagreed with his boss on a range of
issues before being fired last month, isn’t the point. When faced with
the unusual circumstances surrounding the private back-channeling over
aid to Ukraine, he did his job—telling aides, according to testimony,
that “they should have nothing to do with foreign policy” and should
“brief the lawyers.”
As the impeachment drama has unfolded, people caught up in the investigation are drawing fire for being disloyal to Trump.
It
was the president who tweeted: “Never Trumper Republicans, though on
respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more
dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for
them, they are human scum!”
But—leaving the rough language
aside—is everyone who offers information unhelpful to the president a
Never Trumper? Bolton, a full-throated conservative hawk, was the
president’s pick after two previous national security advisers were
forced out.
In our tribal politics, does every former friend, aide
and ally whose professional path diverges automatically get branded an
enemy?
I
got a taste of this yesterday when I said the closed-door testimony of
William Taylor was a setback for the president. You know who agreed with
me? John Thune, the Senate Republican whip, who said of Taylor’s
testimony that “the picture coming out of it…is not a good one.”
I
further noted that Taylor is a career foreign service guy, first named
ambassador to Ukraine by George W. Bush, and lured out of retirement by
Mike Pompeo to be acting ambassador. That hardly fits the resume of a
Never Trumper.
But I got slammed by pro-Trump tweeters as unfair
to the president as they insisted we didn’t know what Taylor had
testified. Sorry, his lengthy opening statement was made public.
The
president’s preferred narrative is that he’s constantly being
undermined by the Deep State. And sometimes that’s true. The senior
administration official dubbed Anonymous—who ripped Trump as amoral in a
New York Times op-ed and is about to publish a book—is certainly no friend of the president.
But not everyone—certainly not John Bolton—fits under that umbrella. As the Times pointed out yesterday:
“The
witnesses heading to Capitol Hill do not consider themselves part of
any nefarious deep state, but simply public servants who have loyally
worked for administrations of both parties only to be denigrated,
sidelined or forced out of jobs by a president who marinates in
suspicion and conspiracy theories.
“But it is also true that some
career officials, alarmed at what they saw inside the corridors of
government agencies, have sought ways to thwart Mr. Trump’s aims by
slow-walking his orders, keeping information from him, leaking to
reporters or enlisting allies in Congress to intervene.”
The paper has another piece on former top aide Steve Bannon and friends setting up a pro-Trump war room, built around a small radio show. And their message:
“Stop
calling the inquiry a ‘witch hunt’ and a ‘deep state’ conspiracy, they
said by way of guidance to the president and his advisers, because it’s
deluding too many Trump supporters into a sense of complacency.
“Stop insisting that polls showing majority public support for the impeachment inquiry are ‘fake news’ — because they aren’t.
“Stop
dismissing everyone who testifies about the Trump administration’s
dealings with Ukraine as a radical unelected bureaucrat.”
Radical unelected bureaucrat was the phrase in a White House statement aimed at Bill Taylor.
Sometimes
in politics, there’s a rough parting of the ways. Trump was friendly
with Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Anthony Scaramucci,
Omarosa, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and many others, and now he’s not.
Some of them betrayed him, or turned out to be crooks; others he simply
soured on.
But
those who are caught up in the Ukraine investigation are not
necessarily anti-Trump backstabbers. They can also be people who tried
to do the right thing and now want to tell the truth.
