Hiring John Bolton Would Be a Betrayal of Donald Trump's Base

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/hiring-john-bolton-would-be-a-betrayal-of-donald-trumps-base/555020/

Hiring John Bolton Would Be a Betrayal of Donald Trump's Base

The president won the 2016 election with foreign-policy positions antithetical to those championed by the perennially hawkish Iraq War supporter.
Joshua Roberts / Reuters

Conor Friedersdorf
Mar 9, 2018 Politics

snip//

Trump hiring Bolton would fuel this same loss of faith in democratic politics, even as it poses similar substantive risks: Bolton is another hawk who shows no evidence of having learned from past mistakes; and he’d be put in a position to urge many new wars—he has favored many more wars in his lifetime than America has fought, including all the most ill-considered wars that it has actually fought.

What’s more, the risks that a hawk prone to supporting ill-considered wars would pose to any administration are likely to be magnified under the erratic, bellicose Trump, especially if he seeks to compensate for his fragile ego or insecure masculinity, or simply decides he wants to be an even greater object of attention.

Even setting psychology aside, the elevated risks remain.

After all, Obama’s cautious instincts made him much less interventionist than (to cite just two examples) his Iraq-War supporting secretaries of state, whereas Trump, in spite of his anti-interventionist, “America First” campaign rhetoric, has his own long history of hawkishness, even recording a video in 2011 urging the U.S. to go into Libya and overthrow the regime there. Plus, Trump is arguably less prepared to prosecute a war than any of his predecessors in living memory (for reasons noted at length in this case against more U.S. warring in Syria), making it especially fraught for him to have an extreme hawk as an adviser.

As Damon Linker, who shares all of these concerns, points out, Trump is “prone to making impulsive decisions” and “tends to defer to the most forceful voice in the room, especially when it conveys information with confident bluster. That would give Bolton enormous power to shape policy—which means the power to get the U.S. to launch big new wars as well as expand the numerous ones we're already waging across wide swaths of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.”

Bolton is also unusually brash and undiplomatic in his rhetoric. The White House needs a counterbalance to those qualities, not another rhetorical bomb thrower. And just as Obama’s appointments carried an opportunity cost, robbing Democrats of a bigger bench of noninterventionists going forward, so too will the Trump administration deprive the GOP of folks who share the noninterventionist ideas that clearly appeal to a large swath of its primary electorate.

All things considered, Bolton seems uniquely ill-suited to the job. Do noninterventionist Trump supporters care enough to speak up against him? As yet, Tucker Carlson’s smug trolling is the most vocal opposition on offer; and because Carlson has already deployed his one skeptical facial expression and undifferentiated contempt in ostensible takedowns of everyone from a Teen Vogue editor to America’s Roma community, even regular viewers have been trained to regard his words as mere mercenary theater. Bolton’s possible rise thus lays bare this problem: The populist right is without any means to stop recklessness, leaving Bolton skeptics to hope superficial Trump still doesn’t like his mustache. Wouldn’t it be something if in the end that spared us from a catastrophic war?

[CincyDem]

1. Im sorry...did part of this announcement include...

...a statement from Trump saying he’s no longer a card carrying white racist. Cuz that’s the only way he angers his base.

[eleny]

2. That is the sad truth

[still_one]

7. yup, for them racism trumps anything else

[Autumn]

3. That won't matter at all to his base.

[Va Lefty]

4. You make excellent points, but it's trump. They don't care!

[njhoneybadger]

5. His base is clueless

[lunasun]

6. No they will stick with trump . He is doing his thing to MAGA they will tell you

[quartz007]

8. tRumps base has their tongue

stuck to a tube of crazy glue in tRump's small hands.
Impossible to break that bond unless...

tRump bans all assault rifles or gets caught getting a blow job in Mar-a-lago from a gay man.

[TheBlackAdder]

9. Trump is at the, "I need to start a war!" phase of his failing presidency. All roadblocks are removed.

[Kirk Lover]

10. What is really going to fracture this disgusting base...is when they fully realize

that there is no wall. We will have a good 10% of so peel away with that one. That is if we were say subjected to this asshole long term. I really don't think long term for this asshole. I give him one year.

[quartz007]

12. Main and overriding reason for selecting Bolton..

war monger Bolton is the only person tRump found who will go hand in hand with the dear leader on killing the Iran nuclear deal, which he has repeatedly said he wants killed.

[dalton99a]

13. Trump could rape their daughter tomorrow and they would defend him

[Corgigal]

14. Wait till Trump base

Finds out that the draft is back, and it will be grabbing their kids. Might get a few of ours, but anyone who has any means already saw this, and tried to place their young person out of harms way. Over seas, in college, hiding spot. Etc...

I'm sorry for anyone serving in any active duty capacity. They don't care about their own families, they certainly don't care about you.

[JHB]

15. More proof that Conor Friedersdorf has no clue.

Trump's base doesn't actually care about neocons, and whatever might linger from earlier eras has been erased by Bolton's haunting of the FOX News Green Room.

And he's publishing in The Atlantic. Reminder, Connor me boyo, Trump's base does not read The Atlantic. Wear that lack of reading as a badge of honor, in fact, you useless dink.

[StevieM]

16. Trump's base does not care about the issues. It cares about spewing hatred at people

who they consider to be their enemies.

I think the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq War in 2003 were also the biggest cheerleaders for Donald Trump in 2016, including during the primaries.

[Oneironaut]

17. Sorry, but Donald Trump's base's stance on issues are whatever Trump says they are.

If Trump says that war is good, they'll cheer for war. If Trump says that apples are blue and pigs can fly, then Trump's base will take that as fact. They will follow him and agree with him no matter what he does.

[Initech]

18. "Bolton seems uniquely ill-suited to the job."

Puh-lease!!!!! That's a requirement to work any cabinet level position in the Trump administration! Give me a break!

[Takket]

19. doesn't matter. they will celebrate it

drumpf could hire most anyone to do anything (except Hillary and Obama) and be praised for it by his base. It isn't about policy with these people. It is about a cult of personality, and the crippling need to be "right" in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are wrong about everything.