The Justice Department on Monday filed a lawsuit seeking to block publication.
The legal wrangling, combined with Trump’s heated criticism of Bolton, has generated interest in the book, which has become a number-one best seller on Amazon.com ahead of its publication. Many former Trump aides have published accounts of their time in the White House, but none who held as high-ranking a position as Bolton.
At the very least, the book could undercut the Trump campaign’s argument that the President is far tougher on China than Biden would be, if elected. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. has taken to using the hashtag #BejingBiden in tweets and has accused the Democratic nominee of failing to recognize the threat posed by China’s Communist Party.
The list of Trump’s concessions to China are long, according to Bolton. He was uninterested in supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters last year and told Xi in the summer of 2019 that building camps in the Xinjiang region to imprison hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslim was “exactly the right thing to do.”
Trump, in the Wall Street Journal interview, said he did not give his assent to Xi’s plan for the widespread detentions in Xinjiang. And in the interview with Hannity, the President said, “Nobody has been tough on China and nobody has been tough on Russia like I have. And that’s in the record books and it’s not even close. The last administration did nothing on either.”
The description of Trump’s policies in Bolton’s book will lend credence to Democrats’ claims that the President’s actions essentially gave China a green light to carry out some of its most egregious abuses, including its crackdown on Uighurs and its decision to impose a new national security law on Hong Kong.
The White House announced Wednesday that Trump had signed a bill rebuking the Beijing government over its treatment of the Uighurs minutes after the book excerpts were published.
Defending Taiwan, according to Bolton, also isn’t a priority for the President. He describes Trump as being deferential and at times downright obsequious to Xi, at one point calling him the greatest Chinese leader in 300 years — and then amending it to “the greatest leader in Chinese history.”
The revelations came out at almost the exact time that Secretary of State Michael Pompeo was meeting China’s top foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi, for secretive talks at the Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. Both sides have so far refused to discuss the agenda for the talks.
Bolton argues that House Democrats could have expanded their impeachment inquiry beyond Ukraine to focus on what the former security aide called a “pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behavior that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency.”
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