I just finished slugging my way through John Bolton’s book about his time in the Trump White House. It is perhaps one of the worst written books that I have ever encountered, being essentially just a journal of events. I am sure it has great historical importance because of all of the detailed lists of people, dates, meeting times and quotes from meetings and phone calls. These are all very interesting and important, but certainly make difficult and often exceedingly boring reading. One of my biggest errors as a reader was that I didn’t start a list of people (and their roles) at the beginning to help keep all of the names and places straight. I should have also created a timeline, along with locations, of events. I am sure that I missed something like 90% of the information because of not having been more organized in my reading.

Bolton is a very right wing hawk person, with apparent great disdain for Democrats and “liberals” of all sorts – but he is also obviously extremely smart and thoughtful. While I disagree with many (perhaps most) of his positions and points of view, it is at least fairly easy to understand where he is coming from and why – setting up a situation where I am sure conversations with him would be interesting, informative, useful and perhaps even convincing in many instances. I ended up with feelings of respect for him, even though I still disagree with many of his philosophical points of view.

He descriptions of Trump’s “decision making process” are much worse than I had envisioned. It is clear that Trump really doesn’t have a decision making process, he just has an uncontrolled urge to make decisions in the spur of the moment – with almost no background information and almost no concern about what the impacts of the decisions will be. Bolton summarized this problem in the last chapter of the book where he made the point that in all cases Trump’s only consideration was with respect to how the decision would impact his chances of winning the next election – that was the one and only constraint upon his actions and the substance of his decisions. Having no background, or interest in obtaining background, on any of the things that came before him Trump just decided stuff. In important decision making meetings with his staff and leaders of other countries he demands to be front and center, and then just meanders and jumps from subject to subject in no particular order and without any apparent concern about truth, validity, or relative importance. He just rambles around, firing people, making snap decisions, reversing his own decisions, interfering with other people’s roles and insulting whoever might be in range.

My impression from all of the detailed stories (hundreds of them) was that he really wants to be one of the main oligarchs in the world, alongside of petty dictators and leaders such as Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He really likes (craves) the authority to be able to make any decision at any time without restraints or the need to understand the implications of the outcomes. As I mentioned above, the only restraints he felt compelled to follow are those that he thinks might negatively impact his chances for winning the next election.

The main takeaway from all of this is that Trump is totally incompetent, is mentally unhinged, and will have NO restraints upon his actions should he get elected again because there will be no “next” election to consider. He will be totally free to do whatever it is that his “base” allows him to do, without constitutional or legal bounds. It is obvious that the constitution and the Republicans have taken the position that it is impossible for the President to break the law, impossible for there to be constraints on his action, and impossible to control except for things that he agrees upon. In Trump’s case, he doesn’t appear to agree to any controls – and his supporters appear to be in total agreement with that point of view. He is an exceedingly dangerous and unpredictable man.