Bolton also claims that at the G20 meeting, Trump reportedly openly endorsed Xi’s plan to “basically [build] concentration camps in Xinjiang” for China’s Uighur population, a predominately-Muslim minority group in China. “According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do,” Bolton writes. “The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.” (During another meeting with Xi, Bolton also notes that Trump told the Chinese president that “people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for him.”)
And Xi was far from the only authoritarian leader with whom Trump openly tried to curry favor, with the Times reporting that Bolton describes multiple instances of Trump’s “willingness to halt criminal investigations ‘to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked.’” On one such occasion, the Post notes, Bolton recounts that Erdogan gave Trump a memo in 2018, which claimed a Turkish firm under investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York was innocent. “Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people,” Bolton writes. The president also was reportedly “largely persuaded” by Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s attempts to get Trump to support Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, as Putin executed a “brilliant display of Soviet style propaganda” that involved comparing Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó to Hillary Clinton. Bolton recounts that Trump’s chumminess with authoritarian leaders became so alarming to him that he raised his concerns with U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who the Post reports “agreed he also was worried about the appearances created by Trump’s behavior.”
There’s also, of course, the president’s relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose historic 2018 meeting with Trump in Singapore, Bolton says, Trump regarded as “an exercise in publicity.” The president did not actually care about denuclearization efforts, Bolton claims, and Bolton says Trump told him that “he was prepared to sign a substance-free communique, have his press conference to declare victory and then get out of town.” Bolton also recounts that Trump was so desperate to befriend Kim that he reportedly tried to give the leader American gifts—in violation of U.S. sanctions—and then launched a major effort to get Kim a CD of Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” so that the North Korean leader would think Trump’s “Little Rocket Man” monicker for him was actually a term of endearment. “Getting this CD to Kim remained a high priority for several months,” Bolton writes.
Beyond detailing the president’s efforts to suck up to authoritarian leaders, The Room Where It Happened also doesn’t exactly paint a comforting picture of Trump’s intelligence and knowledge of the world. Describing Trump as “erratic” and “stunningly uninformed,” Bolton details instances in which Trump reportedly thought Finland was part of Russia, didn’t know that Britain was a nuclear power, and confused the current and former presidents of Afghanistan. “Bolton attributes a litany of shocking statements to the president,” the Post reports. “Trump said invading Venezuela would be ‘cool’ and that the South American nation was ‘really part of the United States.’” As a result, Bolton writes, the president was even reportedly mocked by some of his closest advisers. During Trump’s 2018 meeting with Kim, for instance, Bolton claims that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Bolton a note about the president, which read: “He is so full of shit.” “What if we have a real crisis like 9/11 with the way he makes decisions?” former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly said about the president at one point, and Bolton notes that shortly after he began his White House tenure, Kelly told the adviser that he “can’t imagine how desperate I am to get out of here.”