How the GOP can regain the voters Trump alienated, but also keep those whom he attracted.

This article appeared in The Dispatch on November 30, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 30, 2020

Donald Trump’s post-November 3 conduct has been consistent with his entire presidency: wholly centered on Donald Trump. One of the worst consequences of this self-indulgence for conservatives is the treacherous fixation on whether one agrees or disagrees with Trump. Even when he embraces some element of conservative truth, he typically so exaggerates or distorts it that one can barely discern the underlying principle.

Or worse. Remember, for example, his diktat at an April 13 coronavirus briefing: “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be.” An unvarnished Trumpism, made in Trumpian style, and utterly contradictory to American conservative thinking.

Rather than aligning with principle (which Trump lacks), long-standing conservatives torqued themselves uncomfortably to support his positions. This is unnatural and unwise, and we must stop it. Politics based on personality rather than philosophy is not conservatism’s credo. When politicians go astray, we judge their failures against our principles. We do not readjust our principles to suit their personal interests, as the paradigm case of Richard Nixon demonstrates. James Buckley, New York’s Conservative Party senator, was the first Republican to call for Nixon’s resignation. In the congressional delegation to the Oval Office that told Nixon he had to go, Barry Goldwater had the most impact.

Liberal pundits complain ceaselessly that today’s Republicans do not demonstrate sufficient courage against Trump. This is surely what liberals want to believe, but they misread conservatives as badly as Trump’s misreading that he owns the party.

Consider Michigan, where Trump’s post-election conspiracy theories met their Waterloo. Defeated by more than 150,000 votes, he authorized litigation asserting massive fraud and electoral malfeasance, as he did nationwide. Not one of his cases produced facts changing even a single vote. This conspiracy must be so vast and so successful that it left no evidence behind, making it modern history’s pre-eminent covert operation.

Rebuffed in state and federal courts, Trump abandoned legal reasoning for pure political force, attempting to rewrite the constitutional role of state legislators to generate slates of pro-Trump electors. He summoned Mike Shirkey and Lee Chatfield, the top Republicans in Michigan’s Senate and House, to Washington, hoping to intimidate them into overturning their state’s counting and certification process. They refused.

The pressure shifted to Michigan’s State Board of Canvassers. The Republican national and Michigan state chairs urged the board to postpone certification for two weeks, thereby enabling more mischief. Republican board member Aaron Van Langevelde disagreed, in plainly conservative terms: “We have a clear legal duty to certify the results of the election, as shown by the returns that were given to us. … We cannot and should not go beyond that. As John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men.’”

Shirkey, Chatfield and Van Langevelde are heroes, and far from alone. National GOP leaders can profit from their example. If these three Michiganders can do it, so can the rest of us.

With Trump’s efforts now defeated in fact, if not yet in his imagination, what comes next? One immediate project is producing documentation analogous to the Black Book of Communism, to serve as a definitive refutation of Trump’s extravagant, unsubstantiated claims of “stealing the election.” Such a work will not convince all conspiracy theorists, but we need an authoritative, even encyclopedic, recital of the truth for future use.

Longer term, there must be a broad “conversation” about the direction of the conservative movement and the Republican party. Much of the havoc Trump wreaked is uniquely due to his ego, his public style, and his distortion of basic conservative philosophy. We should have no illusions that excising Trump’s lesions from the body politic will be easy. Many conservatives invested themselves in his success and have not yet receded. Still, there is no point in demanding that they confess error as an auto da fe. We need instead a “malice toward none, charity toward all” approach, which is fully justified by the Democratic left’s larger threat, whether from Biden or his successors.

Our objective should be restoring to conservatism an unmistakably Reaganite optimism and confidence: the “morning in America” crowd defending our “shining city on a hill,” not Trump’s dystopian “American carnage” approach. We can thereby regain the voters Trump alienated, but also keep those whom he attracted. Blue-collar families who left the Democratic party in 1980 were called “Reagan Democrats,” and those who have voted for Trump are essentially their contemporary counterparts. The proposed “conversation” may be lengthy, but there is every reason to believe it will succeed with enough work.

We need to start now, in time for Georgia’s critical January 5 runoffs. Victory for incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler will produce a 52-vote Republican Senate majority, a major check against Biden administration excesses. Placating desolate Trump supporters is purportedly the rationale for not speaking truthfully about Trump’s defeat, but hard political logic points in exactly the opposite direction. By pursuing his personal interests, Trump has vastly complicated the prospects for winning both runoffs. For no reason other than ego, he induced Perdue and Loeffler to demand the resignation of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state. Now, some Trump supporters argue for boycotting Perdue and Loeffler because they are insufficiently pro-Trump, perhaps writing in Trump’s own name to show their dissatisfaction.

Nothing like fratricide to kick off a crucial election campaign. Obviously, keeping a GOP Senate majority is the immediate electoral priority, which underscores precisely why remaining silent on Trump’s conspiracy theories is so damaging. His impending campaign visit to Georgia could well cause more harm. Republican voters will accept the truth if explained rationally by responsible party leaders. But if all they hear is Trump barking, they may well believe, and far beyond Georgia, that no one disputes his version of “the stolen elections.” That would be dangerous beyond calculation.

Looking toward 2024, the risks of silence only grow. The “Trump lane” to the party’s presidential nomination will be congested, especially if Trump is still in it. Just as Democrats almost blew their 2020 prospects by endlessly rehashing “Russian collusion,” we could do the same by relitigating “the steal” merely to gratify Trump’s fantasy. While a crowded race to be Trump’s heir would free up lanes for those who do not seek that role, such lanes might disappear if the “stolen election” becomes dogma. It is far easier to avoid this calamity by speaking now, rather than waiting until minds and memories are hardened by unrefuted Trump logorrhea.

Preparing the battlefield for 2024 will largely unfold through Republican responses to Biden’s priorities. We will see no lack of enthusiasm for the opposition party’s most important duty: opposition. The issue is whether we proceed in Trump mode, further undermining the integrity and legitimacy of our institutions, or whether we fight as true conservatives, attacking leftist policies without despoiling the foundations of America’s flourishing.

The Senate in particular will have a frontline role dealing with the Biden presidency through the “advice and consent” process for his nominees. Several Republican senators have already criticized those nominated for national-security positions, laying down markers that they might fight confirmation. I agree with their policy critiques, especially Biden’s likely fecklessness on China. What they have not addressed, however, is the Senate’s proper role in assessing executive branch nominees (life-tenured judicial nominees residing in a completely separate analytical framework). In a world truer to the intent of the Framers, the Senate would grant wide deference to a president’s choices, recognizing that his views control executive policies, not the views of his subordinates. The legitimate targets of opposition should be only those with grave personal failings or views beyond the range of reason.

I have some standing to raise this issue. Twice in George W. Bush’s presidency, Biden unjustifiably tried to block my nominations, first as an undersecretary of State, and later as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. My complaint, however, is constitutional, not personal. In recent years, increasing partisanship in advice-and-consent matters has risked transforming our system of separated powers into something quasi-parliamentary. So far, Biden’s nominees are not beyond the pale. Quite the contrary. He and his team instead embody Disraeli’s famous put-down of Gladstone’s front bench: “You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest.”

Allow Biden these nominees; it will serve him right. Make their confirmations miserable, to be sure. Harry them with uncomfortable questions, exposing the weaknesses in Biden’s and their own stated policy positions and records. Once they take office, haul them back repeatedly for hearings. This would all serve the greater good. I am not so naïve to believe that reversion to the norm here will arise solely from constitutional arguments. Still, one can appeal to conservative Senators aspiring to the presidency to imagine their reactions when Democrats with blood in their eyes are rampaging against their nominees. Just a suggestion.

With Trump thrashing around for the next four years and Biden in the White House, conservatives face a sustained two-front struggle. Nonetheless, it is entirely winnable with persistent concentration and effort. We must remind ourselves that it was always morning in Reagan’s America, and it should be in ours as well.

How Trump is weakening America: His refusal to concede defeat strengthens Russia and China

This article appeared in The New York Daily News on November 17, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 17, 2020

As Russia, China and other adversaries try to undermine our citizenry’s confidence in American institutions, Donald Trump has been their hopefully unwitting ally. Oblivious to anything not directly benefitting him, Trump spent much of the 2020 campaign, and has spent nearly every waking hour since Nov. 3 complaining that the outcome was rigged, and that massive conspiracies to commit fraud are overturning his re-election.

Trump’s unprecedented insistence that the core machinery of U.S. elections (voter identification and vote casting, counting and certification) is being manipulated is obviously wrong. Significant protections and safeguards are built into the electoral process in every state and county because we know that the possibilities for fraud and stolen elections are ever-present, notwithstanding the dewy-eyed view of some commentators. If Trump had evidence of election-rigging or fraud, he should have produced it by now. He has not; lawsuits have flamed out or been radically pared back.

But his continued aspersions on the 2020 election buttress the case our enemies make against us. Now, they can quote an American president for their own ends.

Without a doubt, Russian and Chinese efforts in the 2016 and 2020 elections have been devoted to undermining America’s confidence in its own institutions, increasing mistrust among our fellow citizens, and confusing the public discourse with false and misleading information. They have most certainly used cyberwarfare against the integrity of our elections, and China’s subversive efforts especially have ranged far more broadly, as Vice President Mike Pence has previously made clear.

We, and Trump in particular, do Moscow’s and Beijing’s work for them when we argue whether they favor Trump or favor Biden. Russia and China favor themselves; merely inducing Americans to argue about their strategies is likely a vital part of the strategies themselves. Trump has been told all this, but his fascination with himself bleaches out all other concerns in his public remarks.

Attacking America’s institutions is not a Republican Party or conservative hallmark. For Trump, it is something of a commonplace. For example, in a 2017 pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Trump said he respected Russia’s Vladimir Putin. O’Reilly responded that Putin was “a killer.” Trump paused for a few seconds — perhaps actually reflecting on what was he wanted to say — before responding, “We’ve got a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?”

This Trumpian moral equivalency emerges all too often. Prior to his embarrassing exchange with O’Reilly, Trump said of Putin in 2015, “he’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what he have in this country.” The list of comparable examples is depressingly long.

After Nov. 3, Trump’s antics reached fever-pitch. In nearly incoherent remarks during the early hours of Wednesday, Nov. 4, as the vote totals were turning against him, Trump said, “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” On Nov. 5, Trump said further, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” Even when he seemingly lets the truth slip out, as on Nov. 15, when he admitted a Biden win, he quickly reverses course.

All of this is propaganda, which does constitute “an embarrassment to our country,” coming as it does from the president. Trump’s record over four years, and continuing right until today, is in the sociological expression Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan popularized, “defining deviancy down” in the political world. Our expectations for Trump are so low, we have lost the capacity to be surprised.

Fortunately, however, Trump’s abnormality provides precisely the way to repair the damage his presidency, and especially his post-election performance, have caused us internationally. We must stress that Trump is an aberration, an anomaly, rather than an accurate reflection of the American system or its people. Trump’s war with the election results, sadly but ironically helpfully, is the best proof of his aberrant status.

To repair the damage that his tweets and his actions have caused in recent days, as with repairing the larger damage he has done to our reputation overseas, we need to emphasize that the 2020 election has, hopefully, brought a return to “normalcy.” Biden may not like being this century’s Warren Harding, but that may just be his lot, at least in the rest of the world’s estimate.

We will have significant debates between normal Republicans and Democrats about Biden’s foreign and domestic policies, which we and the world will welcome as normal, and this too will help repair Trump’s damage. The process could actually move quickly. Let’s hope so.

Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

China is not the juggernaut of Wall Street financiers’ imaginations, but that doesn’t make its expansionism any less of a threat.

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on November 17, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 17, 2020

With Joe Biden’s election now declared by the press, albeit still unacknowledged by Donald Trump, it is appropriate to consider what policies his administration will pursue starting Jan. 20. Any new president’s national-security policy would be more coherent, consistent and sustained than Mr. Trump’s. The risk with Mr. Biden is not that his policy will be chaotic, but that it will be badly misguided.

One thing is certain: China is the most significant international threat that America—and the global West generally—now faces. And that will be true for the rest of this century. Mr. Biden’s real views on dealing with China are obscure, more collateral damage from an election campaign that rarely debated foreign and defense policy in any substantive way.

Much remains to be seen, especially in light of China’s responsibility for worsening the coronavirus pandemic by its concealment and disinformation. Beijing’s disingenuousness has worsened U.S. public opinion about China, a shift echoed world-wide, potentially far more negatively than the adverse reactions to the 1989 Tiananmen Square repression.

Dan Blumenthal of the American Enterprise Institute has stepped into this void with “The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State.” Serious practitioners and students of U.S.-China relations will need to reckon with his analysis.

Mr. Blumenthal’s approach will catch many by surprise. He says plainly that “China has taken advantage of American complacency.” He rejects the conventional thinking that China’s domestic economy is still moving from strength to strength, thereby providing Chinese president Xi Jinping and the Communist Party with the wherewithal to insist on China’s centrality in Asia and to challenge the U.S. globally. Indeed, it is key to Mr. Blumenthal’s “China nightmare” thesis that Mr. Xi’s domestic policies (and those of his immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao) have rolled back many of the dramatic, market-oriented reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era in favor of increased state control. The Xi regime is impairing China’s economic growth (and any prospect for an innovation-based economy) and laying the basis for failure internationally. Mr. Blumenthal writes that the main thesis of his book “is that despite (or perhaps because of) China’s growing internal weaknesses, it is pushing forward grand strategic ambitions.” China is not the juggernaut of Wall Street financiers’ imaginations, but that doesn’t make its expansionism less a threat.

Mr. Blumenthal challenges received wisdom in other ways. Contrary to the prevailing mantra of China’s “peaceful rise,” his analysis stresses that Mao Zedong and his successors repeatedly used military force against their geographical neighbors. They are doing it today, from the East and South China Seas to the “line of actual control” on the disputed frontier with India.

Domestically, the Xi regime is, among other things, engaging in armed repression against ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uighurs; crushing dissent in Hong Kong (and thereby violating the “handover” agreement with the U.K.); and initiating a “social credit” system so the state can rank all Chinese citizens in every aspect of their lives, from jaywalking to dissent. China faces “insurmountable social problems,” Mr. Blumenthal writes. But “a weaker China . . . does not necessarily mean a risk-averse China.”

While China’s theft of intellectual property is a huge problem for the U.S., Mr. Blumenthal argues further, we cannot ignore the reality that America and Japan purposely transferred considerable scientific and technological knowhow to China. When we assign responsibility for the consequences of this catastrophic error, we need not look far.

Beijing apparently never received the memo that the age of empire is over. The Chinese Communists have focused on fully restoring the Qing empire’s boundaries, and no lacuna in achieving that goal is more painful than Taiwan’s de facto independence. In resolutely Orwellian fashion, China has insisted so fiercely on its distorted interpretation of the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué’s “one China” language that even Americans now unwittingly accept China’s version. That suits Beijing; it doubtless hopes Mr. Biden’s team will find those pesky Taiwanese as much a nuisance as did Jimmy Carter, for thwarting what Mr. Blumenthal calls China’s “main strategic-military priority since the end of the Cold War.”

Taiwan’s example of freedom and openness, Mr. Blumenthal contends, is enormously disruptive on the mainland. The U.S. could put the Communist Party in a vise by using information statecraft and other forms of political warfare. China has for years been waging political warfare against us, so it is well past time to implement a counterstrategy. In cyberspace, America is doing precisely that, forestalling or retaliating against efforts to influence our domestic political discourse, thus building deterrence to prevent such attacks in the future.

While a true grand strategy toward China is urgently needed, Beijing’s obsession with Taipei provides Washington an asymmetric response to objectionable Chinese behavior. We can answer its belligerence and intransigence through diplomatic or political means, wounding the Chinese Communists deeply, and simultaneously bolstering Taiwan.

The most consequential step, one I have urged for over 20 years, is for America to grant Taiwan full diplomatic recognition. By all customary international law criteria (a defined territory and population, a capital city, and a government carrying out normal governmental functions), Taiwan is a sovereign state, and democratic to boot. Relations between the U.S. and China would chill dramatically, but that is what China should fear, not America. There are smaller steps Washington could take. We could, for example, regularly receive Taiwanese officials in U.S. government buildings, which would seriously undermine the legitimacy of China’s campaign to force Taiwan into a morganatic union.

Our relations with Beijing will not get easier over the next four years. Mr. Blumenthal has done the Biden administration a favor with “The China Nightmare.” Let’s hope the president-elect takes advantage of it.

THE 2020 US election is over. Welcome to another uniquely American institution, the “transition” to the Biden Administration.

This article appeared in The Daily Express on November 15, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 15, 2020

We have perhaps the longest transition of any democracy, inherited from the Constitution’s first days, because of the geographic reach and limited transport capabilities among the 13 newly united states. Today, with presidential Inaugurations fixed for January 20, the transition is over a month shorter than originally. America’s most important presidential transition followed the 1800 election, when John Adams, the defeated Federalist incumbent, handed over to his Republican challenger, Thomas Jefferson.

In 1797, George Washington left office graciously, succeeded by Adams, his own Vice President. For Adams to accept defeat by the opposition party, however, was a big deal.

Jefferson said memorably in a brief inaugural address “we are all Republicans; we are all Federalists.”

He was sworn in by the new Chief Justice, John Marshall, nominated by Adams after his defeat, and confirmed by the last Federalist Senate majority after their defeat; so much for the supposed “inappropriateness” of nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court before the 2020 election.

Marshall was serving contemporaneously as Adams’ Secretary of State, and also served under Jefferson for approximately a month, a practice now unthinkable.

The 1800-01 transition was not free from rancour. Adams left town before Jefferson’s swearing-in, something we may also see on January 20.

But in their later years, Jefferson and Adams renewed their friendship from the time they crafted the Declaration of Independence.

They both died on July 4, 1826, the Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary. You can’t make it up.

Can anyone imagine Trump playing the roles of the Founding Fathers? Of course not. He will not leave graciously like Washington; so far, he has made Adams look like a man of noblesse oblige; and, unlike Jefferson, he is incapable of saying “we are all Republicans, we are all Democrats.”

So, what is likely in the two months before Joe Biden is sworn in?

At present, Trump has not only not conceded, he continues to insist the election was rigged.

He has unleashed Rudy Giuliani and other surrogates to “litigate” his legal challenges through news conferences and interviews, rather than in State and Federal courts.

Press reports indicate that lawyers previously recruited by the Trump campaign are now making themselves unavailable to join the legal efforts, and new recruits are scarce.

Judicial results for Trump so far are dismal, and little or no probative evidence or new legal arguments seem to be forthcoming.

The likely outcome is that Trump’s badly-faltering legal offensive will continue to collapse, perhaps ending with a whimper within the week. That doesn’t mean Trump will concede, gracefully or otherwise. Instead, he will proclaim “stab in the back” theories about why he lost: list the many “traitors” in his Administration and campaign who undercut him (I expect to be on that list, and in very good company indeed); and attack the always unpopular news media, political pollsters, and left-wing activists now poised to destroy the country.

Make no mistake, unless Republican leaders speak out against this fantasy, Trump will convince many people that the 2020 election was stolen.

Commentators left and right argue that any effort to present the truth to Republican base voters will inevitably fail, so loyal are they to Trump. Ironically, this theory’s most ardent advocates are leftist Democrats, who hope to tie the Trump albatross around Republicans’ necks forever. The stakes are high.

Ultimately, of course, if truth cannot prevail, the future would indeed be dire.

But all that is really required is for Republican leaders other than Trump to do some leading.

If more speak out, the Trump fantasy can be exposed, and his supporters will reconcile themselves with his defeat while remaining loyal to what will hopefully be a revived, Reaganite Republican party.

In the meantime, the current controversy over whether Biden and his team can formally begin the transition process will also be resolved.

Growing numbers of congressional Republicans are pressing for Biden and his senior staff to receive intelligence briefings; others have concluded what should now be obvious, namely that the formal transition itself should get underway.

There need be no admission or concession by Trump that he has lost in order to make the prudent management point that whoever wins needs to be fully prepared on January 20.

Trump obviously doesn’t need a transition, but Biden does, and the sooner it begins, the better.

Forecasting what happens after January 20 remains difficult until the results of two runoff elections for Georgia’s Senate seats are held on January 5.

Peculiarities of Georgia election law require the runoffs, which will be hotly fought. If Republicans prevail in just one, they will retain control of the Senate; if they win both, they will have come through a difficult 2020 campaign losing just one seat net.

Effectively, therefore, anything Biden wants will require dealing with Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who will be the second most powerful man in Washington.

Somewhat under-reported is the success story for Republicans in the House of Representatives, where they are already projected to gain six-to-seven seats from their pre-November 3 totals, and probably more.

A majority of the House is 218 members, and Republicans could be just around 212. If House Democrats maintain their unity, they can still work their will, but the possibility of splitting their slender majority present numerous opportunities for Republicans.

Even more troubling for Democrats and Speaker Nancy Pelosi are the upcoming 2022 elections; in US history the incumbent President’s congressional party almost always suffers losses, sometime quite significant, in the midterms.

This shadow alone will diminish the Democrats’ maneuvering room for the next two years.

In short, the 2020 election was a loss for Trump, but a surprising success for Republicans in the House and Senate, and also in the States, where they picked up one additional governership, and several state legislative houses, crucial in the redistricting required by the 2020 census results. Stay tuned!

This article appeared in The Washington Post on November 11, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 11, 2020

As of this writing, the Republican Party has not suffered permanent damage to its integrity and reputation because of President Trump’s post-election rampaging. This will not be true much longer.

Trump has so far failed to do so, and there is no indication he can. If he can’t, his “right” to contest the election is beside the point. The real issue is the grievous harm he is causing to public trust in America’s constitutional system. Trump’s time is running out, even as his rhetoric continues escalating. And time is running out for Republicans who hope to maintain the party’s credibility, starting with Georgia’s two Senate runoffs in January. Here is the cold political reality: Trump is enhancing his own brand (in his mind) while harming the Republican brand. The party needs a long internal conversation about the post-Trump era, but first it needs to get there honorably.

Consider the competing interests. Donald Trump’s is simple and straightforward: Donald Trump. The near-term Republican interest is winning the Georgia runoffs. The long-term Republican interest emphatically involves winning those Senate seats, but it also involves rejecting Trump’s personalized, erratic, uncivil, unpresidential and ultimately less-than-effective politics and governance.

One approach holds that coddling Trump while he trashes the U.S. electoral system will help him get over the loss, thereby making it easier to reconcile him to leaving the Oval Office. But this coddling strategy is exactly backward. The more Republican leaders kowtow, the more Trump believes he is still in control and the less likely he will do what normal presidents do: make a gracious concession speech; fully cooperate with the president-elect in a smooth transition process; and validate the election process itself by joining his successor at the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Coddling proponents plead that an enraged Trump will jeopardize the chances of victory in the Georgia runoffs. But that is true only if party leaders do not speak up, explaining to voters what the real facts are. Do we in the GOP not trust our own base enough to absorb the truth? They will find out in due course anyway if Trump’s election litigation indeed crashes into reality. Once in court, state or federal, before judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats, actual witnesses will have to raise their right hands and tell the truth, and then face gale-force cross-examination from lawyers for President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign. It’s one thing to tweet; it’s another thing to testify.

Who is going to explain that to Georgia’s voters? Republican leaders should lay that groundwork now and not cede the field to a president whose interests directly contradict the party’s. Otherwise, they will rue the day they stood silent.

In the meantime, the litigation swirls on, risking, if it is ultimately exposed as unfounded, even more destructive consequences to public trust in the electoral process. Trump says he wants the truth. Surely, therefore, his lawyers will not engage in frivolous arguments, obfuscation, pettifoggery or dilatory tactics that would complicate uncovering the truth, right? Sadly, that has never been Trump’s style during a long career of litigation as a lifestyle.

Republican passivity risks additional negative consequences for the country. Trump is engaging in what could well be a systematic purge of his own administration, starting with the utterly unjustified firing of Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper this week and continuing through high- and mid-level civilian offices in the department. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, head of the National Nuclear Safety Administration, was forced to resign. Washington is filled with rumors that the CIA and FBI directors are next.

This is being done with just 10 weeks left in the administration. All transitions bring uncertainty, but to decapitate substantial parts of the national-security apparatus during such a period for no reason other than personal pique is irresponsible and dangerous. Republicans know this.

Simultaneously, Trump is frustrating Biden’s transition, based on the 2000 precedent, when George W. Bush’s transition was delayed for 37 days by Al Gore’s contesting the Florida results. Two wrongs don’t make a right. It implies no acknowledgment of Biden’s legitimacy as president-elect for Trump to facilitate prudent transition planning, certainly in the national-security field, nor in finalizing distribution plans for a coronavirus vaccine, which will largely occur next year. At least, that’s how a confident, mature, responsible president would see it.

For the good of America, the 2020 election needs to be brought expeditiously to the conclusion that all logic tells us is coming. National security requires that the transition get underway effectively. These are Republican values. We will acknowledge reality sooner or later. For the good of the party as well as the country, let’s make it sooner.

This article appeared in The Sunday Telegraph on November 7, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 7, 2020

The US presidential race has now widely been called for Joe Biden. The counting has been slower than we’d like, and legal challenges to the process are under way. But if things end as now seems likely, whatever damage the electoral process and the nation’s institutions have suffered in recent days is easily repairable. After the 2000 election, Democratic nominee Al Gore precipitated a contentious recount in Florida – I spent 33 days there on George W Bush’s legal team – and America recovered in due course. We will recover from this, too.

There is, however, one significant caveat: if the Leader of the Free World continues to claim, with essentially no supportive evidence, that the election was stolen through fraud, we will have far more serious problems than merely reconciling disappointed partisans to the reality of defeat.

In the early hours of Wednesday, and again on Thursday evening, Donald Trump asserted unambiguously that he had won the election. He argued that Democrats, in league with corrupt, dishonest or incompetent election officials in six or seven states, were dumping out hundreds of thousands of fake ballots, thereby producing fraudulent majorities affording Biden an Electoral College victory. His surrogates made equally exaggerated claims in multiple state and federal lawsuits, not one of which has brought the Trump campaign any significant vindication, or done the slightest thing to change the results.

This disgraceful performance by the US president is deeply troubling. Any candidate is entitled to express disappointment when he or she loses, complain that life is unfair, and trigger all legitimately available election-law remedies to seek redress for alleged improprieties. Of course, raising claims, however permissible, is not the same as proving them, or showing that even validated claims have had an actual, let alone dispositive, effect on the election itself.
Responsible politicians know that, ultimately, they will pay a price if they go too far, even rhetorically. Apparently, no one ever explained this to Trump, or if they did, he didn’t pay any more attention to it than he usually pays to good advice.

The result is that the Republican Party now faces a character test. The party’s leaders can either reject Trump’s false claims and insist that he provide actual evidence in court, or join in his fantasia and forever tar their own reputations, and that of the party. To date, only a small number of elected Republican officials have commented publicly, evenly divided between these two possibilities. Many more need to speak out, and soon.

There is also a larger question ahead once the election is well and truly behind us, quite possibly once the Electoral College votes, which this year will be on Dec 14. The Republican Party must begin a serious conversation about its new direction going forward, which I hope will return it to a Reaganite approach. It is profoundly wrong to contend, as many commentators already are, that Trump has an iron grip on the party, and will dictate its strategy and determine its candidates from exile at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, perhaps plotting a 2024 Trump presidential campaign.

In fact, Trump’s influence will drop precipitously once he leaves the Oval Office. He will be, in a word he hates, a loser, and the whole world will know it. Only one defeated incumbent president has ever regained the office, and that was, in 1892, Grover Cleveland (who was both the 22nd and 24th president), hardly a compelling precedent. Dozens of prospective 2024 Republican presidential candidates are already lining up. Trump the man will certainly remain a factor, but there is no “Trumpism”; his administration has had no coherent philosophy, certainly not on national security matters. And after Jan 20, the world will no longer hang on every new Trump tweet.

In Washington, attention will shift rapidly to the new Biden administration and its plans, and how well (or poorly) they will fare in a Congress where Republicans probably still control the Senate and Democrats have a diminished majority in the House. Biden faces an angry Left wing in his own party, and his relations with Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, could well be the big political story ahead.

Not all of Trump’s legacy is bad. Millions of blue-collar voters have rejected the Democratic Party’s radicals. Even more inconveniently for the Left, Hispanic support for Republican candidates has swelled nationwide. Without Trump, we can now seek the return of voters whom his behaviour repulsed, and build a long-term Republican governing majority.

Soon again, we will elect a real conservative Republican president.