A vain and impulsive toddler: Donald Trump looks the same from inside the White House as he does from the outside

Getting through its more than 400 pages of play-by-play narrative, a reader comes to Bolton’s defence of tell-all memoirs: they are critical to “parting the curtain,” he says, because “press accounts and ‘instant histories’ are far too often lacking in insight and understanding.” The thing is, Bolton’s insider account is more confirmation than revelation, precisely because the portrait it paints of “chaos as a way of life” comports entirely with the impression given by the media.

“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” Bolton writes. By now, that reads like more of the same.

As a correspondent from Canada, I’m obliged to point out that Justin Trudeau makes a brief appearance as the subject of a well-known Trump tantrum after the G20 meetings in Quebec in 2018. Trump already disliked the Canadian prime minister, Bolton writes, and grew angry when Trudeau used a news conference to complain about a then-ongoing trade dispute. He ordered his staff to take to television to badmouth the Canadian as a backstabber. Canada’s Huawei extradition confrontation with China (still escalating, with Canadians as de facto political hostages) also comes in for some brief discussion, showing Trump willing to use the underlying issue as trade leverage. But for fine details, these episodes are already well known in Canada, and little new is revealed here.

As many critics and reviewers have already noted, much of Bolton’s account consists of self-aggrandizement and hawkish policy arguments. Those elements may be less compelling for many than Bolton’s portrayal of how the White House under Trump works — or doesn’t.

Bolton portrays Trump as impulsive and vain, uninformed and uninterested in being informed, irresponsible and dishonest. He compares Trump to a toddler, with a penchant for “giving personal favours to dictators he likes” — and recounts episodes of Trump liking more dictators, more enthusiastically, than most would prefer. He portrays a series of such dictators playing Trump like a fiddle by appealing to his ego. He confirms the allegations in the impeachment trial and says that case was one example among many of the president subordinating national interests to his own personal and political concerns.

Trying to advise this president, Bolton writes, is like making “policy inside a pinball machine,” where strategy meetings resemble “college food fights,” where a boss obsessed with TV will instruct staff to “praise him more” in their appearances and will often change policy on a whim — often through a tweet — undermining his entire government without knowing it, or without caring.

Trump and his advisers have accused Bolton of being a liar, a washed up crank who was given one of the most powerful and influential jobs in the world out of something like pity. A man not worth paying attention to.

But what Bolton says is similar to what many other former Trump staffers have said, from bit players like Omarosa Manigault Newman and Anthony Scaramucci through the heavy hitters, such as those who testified at the impeachment hearing and former defence secretary James Mattis. Some of it may well be sour grapes, but it comes to seem like every piece of fruit Trump handles eventually spills vinegar.

And although Bolton portrays the media as an awful horde of inaccurate vultures, the picture he paints of Trump’s White House conforms to the image revealed in instalments by the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN.

“Chaos as a way of life.” As I say, no surprise there. Perhaps that it has come to seem humdrum should be the most shocking thing about it.