Donald Trump ‘asked Xi Jinping to help him win re-election’, John Bolton claims
Donald Trump asked Xi Jinping to help him win the next US election, claims former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Donald Trump asked Chinese president Xi Jinping to help him win the next US election and told him he was the greatest leader in China’s history according to an explosive extract of the new book by former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
In a devastating critique of Mr Trump’s approach to China and to national security policy, Mr Bolton said the US president’s dealings with Mr Xi were maverick, unscripted and almost entirely driven by Mr Trump’s assessment of what would help him win re-election.
“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 US national interests,” Mr Bolton wrote.
“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 re-election calculations.”
Mr Bolton wrote this was the way Mr Trump approached all foreign and security policy and said that if Democrats had looked harder they might have found enough information to successfully remove him from office during their impeachment proceedings.
“These and innumerable other similar conversations with Trump formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behaviour that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency. Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behaviour across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different.”
Mr Bolton chose not to testify in the house impeachment hearings.
The extract in the Wall St Journal is the first from Mr Bolton’s book, which was written after he left the White House and fell out with the president. Mr Trump has threatened action against Mr Bolton for the book “The Room Where It Happened”, claiming that it contained classified information.
For more information about my upcoming book release, please review the link below. https://t.co/nx7DHTdQ2T
— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) June 14, 2020
Mr Bolton wrote that in a meeting in Osaka in June last year, Mr Trump told Mr Xi that people were saying that the two-term limit for his presidency should be repealed for him.
“Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and 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.”
Mr Bolton said he would have printed the president’s exact words but the government’s prepublication review process had “decided otherwise”.
Mr Bolton then said that Mr Trump told Mr Xi: “You’re the greatest Chinese leader in 300 years!” before changing it a few minutes later to “the greatest leader in Chinese history.”
Mr Bolton said that at a dinner between Mr Trump and Mr Xi at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires in December 2018, he feared the US president would cave in to Mr Xi’s demands to either eliminate US tariffs or not impose new ones.
“I feared at that moment that Trump would simply say yes to everything Xi had laid out,’ Mr Bolton wrote.
“Trump came close, unilaterally offering that US tariffs would remain at 10 per cent rather than rise to 25 per cent, as he had previously threatened. In exchange, Trump asked merely for some increases in Chinese farm-product purchases, to help with the crucial farm-state vote. If that could be agreed, all the US tariffs would be reduced. It was breathtaking.”
Mr Bolton said that on several occasions, Mr Trump expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations – including involving major firms in China and Turkey – “to, in effect, give personal favours to dictators he liked”.
“The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr Bolton wrote.
Cameron Stewart is also US Contributor for Sky News Australia
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