| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Everyone seems to dislike John Bolton. Donald Trump and his supporters hate the former national-security adviser because his new book is harshly critical of the president (and, apparently, everyone else he came across). Trump's opponents are mad because Bolton had important information relevant to Trump's impeachment inquiry and instead of testifying he decided to save it for his memoir. Even book reviewers are upset, because apparently it's a godawful read on top of everything else. What strikes me about Bolton is that he's basically wrong in his central critique of Trump, which, as he puts it, is that "I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn't driven by reelection calculations." Here's the thing: Politicians care about getting elected. And all else equal, that's a good thing. It means that they attempt to achieve policy outcomes that voters approve of. That's how democracy is supposed to work. The problem with Trump's conduct in the Ukraine scandal wasn't that he was self-interested. Nor was it that he asked a foreign president for a favor. What was wrong — what was a clear abuse of power — was that he asked Ukraine to improperly interfere in a U.S. election by spreading misinformation about his opponent. On China, Bolton reveals a different dynamic. He describes a president desperate to convince his counterpart in Beijing to buy soybeans because it will help him this November, and willing to endorse everything from China's attempts to put down dissidents in Hong Kong to, most awfully, its persecution of Uighurs. Trading human rights for a small bump in agricultural exports is, I'd agree, an absolutely terrible decision. But it's not an abuse of power. It's mostly just inept, especially since the soybean problem was created by Trump's previous decision to start a trade war for no reason. From the reports we have so far, Bolton seems to describe a president who is way out of his league — easily swayed by flattery, unprepared, impulsive, uninformed and lacking any kind of strategic sense. The most favorable interpretation of his "strategy" would be, I suppose, that Trump deliberately gives America's rivals and enemies all they want in the hopes that they'll realize how valuable he is to them and try to help him get re-elected. That wouldn't really be an abuse of power either; it would just be incredibly foolish. And even that almost certainly gives Trump too much credit. The president Bolton reveals, and the man who's been described by so many other insiders, is probably incapable of anything so clever. And it's not all that clever in any event. Trump's lack of support for democracy and human rights in China, in Saudi Arabia, in embracing Putin, haven't hurt him directly with voters. But his ill-considered strategy is partly why so many foreign policy and national security professionals in and out of the government have turned against him. And that in turn has weakened his ability to get anything done and made him perhaps the weakest president of the modern era. Which probably does, overall, make him less likely to win a second term. Now, it may turn out that Trump committed additional abuses of power in conducting his foreign policy. Looking out for his own electoral interests, however, won't by itself be one of them.
1. Dave Hopkins on the stable electoral map. 2. Judith Goldstein at the Monkey Cage on the next head of the World Trade Organization. 3. Michael Tesler on the protests and public opinion. 4. Matt Grossmann spoke with Sarah Treul and Andrew Ballard about the risks Trump creates for Republican politicians. 5. Dan Drezner on U.S. foreign policy and the Blob. 6. Meredith Conroy and Perry Bacon Jr. on partisanship and perceived discrimination. 7. And Susan Davis on Republican women running for Congress. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
⇉〖OpenLoad〗 2020 Superintelligence PelÃcula Completa En LÃnea released 2020. story: La vida de Carol Peters se trastorna cuando es selecci...
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