NYT and WaPo received copies
Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton is due to publish his book on his time in the Oval office on Tuesday but details are being published by the Washington Post and New York Times.
It's another tell-all book and I don't think anyone is surprised by anything Trump does any longer but the headline revelation is that he asked for Xi's help in re-election.
"He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump's exact words, but the government's prepublication review process has decided otherwise."
The idea of the White House is that you're supposed to work for the best interests of the American people. The theme of Bolton's book, according to the early reviews, is that Trump put his re-election above 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. I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn't driven by reelection calculations.
By coincidence or something here that surprised someone, the S&P 500 turned a 14-point gain into a 2-point loss on the heels of these leaks. I'd be careful to conflate them but there isn't anything else in the news and the move was relatively sharp.
