Trump will be inaugurated in Washington later today and the chaos will officially commence. I heard an American on Radio 4 this morning saying America and the world will benefit from the next four years. Let me tell you nobody will benefit except Trump, his immediate family and a few fabulously wealthy oligarchs. The world has plenty of big problems that have defied some of the smartest people on the planet but the US say let's try an idiot to see if he can solve them all. Trump doesn't even understand the problems let alone have any solutions. Everything is set to get worse under him and I mean everything.
Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton was once thought of as a foreign policy ‘hawk’ and very keen on throwing America's military weight around. Trump appointed and then fired him after just 17 months and now claims he’s “as dumb as a rock.” Bolton sounds like a restraining voice of reason compared to his former boss. That’s how far the US has fallen.
Bolton has given an interview to Lewis Goodall at LBC which you can see on YouTube HERE.
He talks of Republican friends and Trump supporters (14 minutes in) who say everything will be fine under Trump because he wants to go down in history as a great president and therefore he’ll do the right thing in the end, regardless of how hair-raising his public comments sometimes are. They admit he has no inherent philosophy and doesn’t do policy detail at all.
Bolton disagrees with them. He says it’s wishful thinking on their part to believe he will make sensible decisions. Trump is unpredictable and makes choices based on what would make his day, what would make him look good, a larger figure on the domestic and international stage, today, as well as what might benefit him personally. That’s as far ahead as he ever thinks.
When as National Security Adviser he briefed Trump, in fact when anybody briefed Trump on any topic in his first term, Bolton claims, Trump always did most of the talking! He honestly thought he knew more than the expert briefing him!
On one occasion on Air Force One, travelling to Helsinki, Bolton spent fifteen minutes trying to brief Trump on security matters for the upcoming summit while the president was focused on watching a football match on the TV! This fits with what others have said. He doesn’t listen because he doesn’t think he needs to. If you genuinely thought you already knew more than anyone about every subject under the Sun, why would you?
How can you solve intractable global problems, the really big ones that find their way to the Oval Office, when you don't listen to an expert explaining what they are or what lasting solutions are possible. Answer: you don't. And Trump won't.
The president is a narcissist and Olympic level stupid to boot. He can’t employ capable people because most of the time they would disagree with him. So, he’s surrounded himself with inadequate yes men and women and oligarchs with similar naked self interest to himself.
Bolton's interview is quite informative and deeply worrying. He thinks Trump will accidentally provoke serious crises because of his simplistic attitude to foreign affairs. Trump believes if he personally has a good relationship with the leader of another country, then everything is OK. That leader (Putin or Xi Jingping, for example) could be fooled into thinking he has a green light to do whatever he wants and the US may find themselves involved in a real conflict situation where some military commitment is needed.
His advice to Kier Starmer and David Lammy is to forget about policy and frame their objectives only about what would make Trump personally look good on that day. Insane, eh? It wouldn't harm things if you offered him money either. He certainly wouldn't be insulted.
Listen to this. Trump launched his own cryptocurrency last Friday which has soared in value and boosted his wealth by a staggering $58 billion at one point, all for doing absolutely nothing!!! More than that, his wife, Melanie has done the same and she has made a cool $1.5 billion. I don’t pretend to understand how this can happen or how these crypto currencies actually work. I assume if he’s made $58 billion, a lot of other people have either lost money or will do very soon.
This is on the eve of him becoming POTUS and looks like corruption on an absolutely unimaginable scale.
In 2019, while he was president he was totally opposed to the whole idea:
He wasn’t a fan. Until someone explained to him how he could make many billions from it by doing nothing and producing nothing of value for humanity. Now he’s a big fan.— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 19 January 2025 at 18:29
It looks to me like a giant Ponzi scheme, but we'll see.
The German ambassador has sent a detailed memo to his government about the Trump second term, the contents of which has been leaked.
Ambassador Andreas Michaelis apparently describes Donald Trump's agenda for his second White House term as one of "maximum disruption" that will bring about "a redefinition of the constitutional order - maximum concentration of power with the president at the expense of Congress and the federal states."
"Basic democratic principles and checks and balances will be largely undermined, the legislature, law enforcement and media will be robbed of their independence and misused as a political arm, Big Tech will be given co-governing power," he is alleged to have said.
I assume this will mean Mr Michaelis being withdrawn from Washington. Trump is OK provided diplomats keep their real opinions private and praise him in public.
I suppose this could apply to a lot, probably the majority, of his own circle. Fasten your seat belts.
