President Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to buy agricultural products from the US to help Trump win states with large farming industries in the 2020 election.
That’s according to an upcoming book by the former national security adviser John Bolton, titled “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”
In an excerpt Bolton wrote that Trump was “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.”
“He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome,” Bolton wrote.
He added that “Trump’s conversations with Xi reflected not only the incoherence in his trade policy but also the confluence in Trump’s mind of his own political interests and U.S. national interests.”
“Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security,” the former national security adviser said. “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.”
The book offers an inside look at events that took place during Bolton’s rocky tenure as Trump’s third national security adviser.
In particular, it includes new details about what happened in the White House during Trump’s efforts to strong-arm Ukraine into delivering political dirt against former Vice President Joe Biden, now the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.
In the book, Bolton accused the House of Representatives of committing “impeachment malpractice” and alleged that the president had engaged in significantly more impeachable conduct than what he was ultimately accused of.
Bolton said the president’s actions related to his China policy “formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behavior that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency.”
Bolton describes several instances where Trump waffles on China-related issues after conversations with Xi, notably on the mass concentration camps Beijing was using to imprison and “re-educate” Uyghur Muslims.
Bolton writes that according to the US interpreter in the room during a conversation between Xi and Trump at the G-20 meeting in June 2019, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was “exactly the right thing to do.”
Bolton adds that Trump didn’t want to sanction China for their crackdown on the Muslim minority because of ongoing trade negotiations.
“Religious repression in China was also not on Trump’s agenda; whether it was the Catholic Church or Falun Gong, it didn’t register,” Bolton writes.
Bolton describes a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un in which the North Korean despot blamed troubled relations between his country and the US on the actions of prior administrations.
Emphasizing the meetings he and Trump had held, Kim told Trump that they could dispel mistrust and work quickly toward a nuclear agreement.
After Trump told Kim that he would seek Senate ratification of any agreement with North Korea, Bolton writes that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo passed him a notepad.
On it was scribbled the message, “he is so full of shit.”
“I agreed,” Bolton writes, going on to note that Kim promised no further nuclear tests.
Before the summit with Putin in Helsinki, Trump asked his advisers if Finland was a part of Russia, or whether it was a “kind of satellite of Russia.”
On his way to the Helsinki meeting, Trump stopped to see then-British Prime Minister Theresa May in the UK.
During that meeting, May’s national security adviser, speaking about the Skripal poisoning, referred to the attack as one on a nuclear power.
“Trump asked, ‘oh, are you a nuclear power?,’ which I knew was not intended as a joke,” Bolton wrote.
Bolton writes that in discussions about toppling the regime of Nicolas Maduro, Trump “insisted on military options for Venezuela,” telling advisers that the country “is really part of the United States.”
And on multiple occasions, Bolton said Trump repeatedly mixed up Afghan President Ashraf Ghani with former President Hamid Karzai.
During a March 2019 meeting at the Pentagon, Trump grilled military leaders about why the US was in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not in Venezuela.
Trump’s repeated insistence that military options be considered to oust Maduro often shocked aides, lawmakers and advisers, Bolton writes.
In a meeting with Florida Republicans, “Trump still wanted a military option,” leaving Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron Desantis “plainly stunned,” while Sen. Marco Rubio, who had heard Trump on the subject before “knew how to deflect it politely.”
When news leaked about a hush-hush meeting on Afghanistan at Trump’s Bedminster resort, Trump complained that CNN had reported the summit was taking place, Bolton writes.
The President told White House counsel Pat Cipollone to call Attorney General Bill Barr about his desire to “arrest the reporters, force them to serve time in jail, and then demand they disclose their sources.”
Trump made headlines in November 2018 when he released a bizarre statement defending the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
It included lines such as “The world is a very dangerous place!” and “maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”
According to Bolton’s book, making headlines was the point.
A story about his daughter Ivanka using her personal email for government business was also in the news at the time.
After waging war on Hilary Clinton during the 2016 campaign for doing the same thing, Trump need a distraction.
“This will divert from Ivanka,” Trump reportedly said. “If I read the statement in person, that will take over the Ivanka thing.”
The former national security adviser has attracted significant criticism from Democrats for including these details in his book after refusing to testify in the House’s impeachment hearings against Trump last year.
He later agreed to testify before the Republican-controlled Senate if subpoenaed, but the upper chamber voted against calling new witnesses in the president’s trial.