As political controversy swirls around the book “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir” by former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, the question that stands out most is the impact of this conversation on President Trump’s political future and his chances of winning a second term in the presidential election scheduled for early November.
President Trump’s hopes for the next election depend on a combination of factors. Among these are the ability of his Democratic rival, John Biden, to lead and the American political climate.
There is also the ability of the Trump administration to achieve qualitative feats in the short time available to it, especially in economic terms and in battling the ravages of the coronavirus epidemic.
There is also relief from the fears of a large segment of the American people of the specter of racial division following the recent racial protests over the recent murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
The content of the books on President Trump’s policies are surely part of the tools for shaping American public opinion in the period ahead. Their contents will be used in media and political attacks against President Trump as a way to show that he is ineligible for a second term of office.
The seriousness of Bolton’s book does not, in my opinion, lie in the statements he made about President Trump lacking knowledge of geography and the military facts, despite his not knowing that the UK is a nuclear power. Such things do not get much attention from the American public.
The most serious point of this book is that it seeks to establish that Trump put his own interest in a second term in office ahead of the US national interest. Bolton made reference to the president asking his Chinese counterpart to help him run for a second term by pointing to the weight of farmers and the Chinese’s increased purchases of soybeans and wheat in the election result.
He also said he was seeking to withhold military aid from Ukraine to pressure it into harming Democratic challenger John Biden. This is the same accusation that the Democrats have already made against President Trump and have tried to use it as an accusation of treason to remove him from office.
Clearly, it is hard to downplay the consequence of what Bolton and others have been saying, feeding President Trump’s critics and opponents with material to offend him. This puts his campaign in constant defense until the November election.
The weight of Bolton’s book is not only in the facts it contains. It also stems from the fact that the controversy over it coincided with the publication of other books. One of them is a book by Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State under George W. Bush Jr. Another book, authored by Trump’s niece, deals with family scandals involving the American president.
If we look at the American political scene in recent months, we can see that President Trump has gone from the square of absolute confidence in victory in the next election to the square of wariness.
He has recently spoken of the prospect of losing this election, citing a number of reasons, including the mail-in ballot supported by the Dems. “Mail-in voting is the only way I’m going to lose,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Times. “Because [Democrats] cheat and rob and steal. They don’t send [ballots] to certain areas, mostly Republican areas.”
Former US Vice President Joe Biden, who received enough support from delegates to the next Democratic convention to run for president in November, appears weaker than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who ran for president in 2016, Trump believes. But he still sees that “the [Dems’] machine is stronger because they’re desperate.”
Trump’s comments about “manipulation” of election results is part of his election tactics. But it also hides an acknowledgment of the polling results, which indicate that Biden leads the polls by 8 to 11 percent on various indices.
This difference can theoretically be recovered by a few internal and external good scores. But the attacks on President Trump by yesterday’s friends give the Democrats powerful ammunition to undermine his chances of winning a second term.
This explains why President Trump recently admitted firmly to his drop in the polls, citing the impact of him being “harassed for three years” that cost him points in the polls. “If I wasn’t constantly harassed for three years by fake and illegal investigations, Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Hoax, I’d be up by 25 points on Sleepy Joe and the Do Nothing Democrats. Very unfair, but it is what it is!!!” he tweeted.
The turnaround in the polls and the renewed support for Biden, which scored 48%, compared to 43% for Trump in April’s polls, is an edifying indication of the detrimental impact of the failed handling of the coronavirus crisis and the protests over George Floyd’s death.
President Trump’s chances of victory now seem to depend entirely on his ability to make quick qualitative strides to turn the tide of the polls before November 5.
