President Donald Trump often talks tough in public about Venezuela's dictatorship, but in his tell-all book, John Bolton, the president's former national security adviser, suggests it's just to win votes in Florida. The contention raises serious questions on whether Trump would maintain a hard line on Venezuela if reelected.
After reading parts of Bolton's book "The Room Where it Happened," due to be released to the public on Tuesday, you get the picture of a U.S. president who is erratic and ignorant, with a high respect for authoritarian leaders and who puts his personal interests above anything else.
"I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn't driven by re-election calculations," Bolton says in the book.
The former top Trump aide, a hard-line conservative, gives several examples of Trump using foreign policy for his political benefit.
In addition to asking the leader of Ukraine to dig up dirt about likely Democratic candidate Joe Biden _ a scandal for which the president was impeached, but later acquitted by the Senate _ Trump asked China's leader Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 elections by increasing agricultural imports from key U.S. states, Bolton says.
On Venezuela, the book depicts Trump, in private, as shifting constantly from being the ultimate hawk _ he says in one meeting that it would be "cool" to invade Venezuela _ to praising Venezuela's tyrant Nicolas Maduro as "smart" and "tough."
At one point, Trump privately refers to Venezuela's National Assembly President and opposition leader Juan Guaido as a "kid" who "doesn't have what it takes." At another point, Trump asked Bolton, to "stay away from it (Venezuela) a little; don't get too much involved," the book says.
As for Trump's overall policy on Venezuela, "The president vacillated and wobbled, exacerbating internal administration disagreements rather than solving them, and repeatedly impeding our efforts to carry out a policy," Bolton writes.
Bolton blames the Treasury Department for allegedly trying to weaken U.S. economic sanctions on Venezuela for fear of hurting U.S. companies such as Visa and Mastercard. He also lashes out against the State Department for closing the U.S. Embassy in Caracas.
While European and Latin American countries left their embassies in Caracas open in 2019, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided to pull out, concerned that U.S. personnel there could be harmed. That "proved harmful to our anti-Maduro efforts," Bolton writes.
Bolton's recollection of Trump's view of Maduro as "smart" and "tough" seems to confirm former Trump Latin America adviser Fernando Cutz's recent statement. Cutz said that Trump "respects" the Venezuelan dictator and speculates that the president may consider making peace with him if reelected.
Cutz told me in an interview that, "I fear that the moment the U.S. elections happen and Florida is no longer necessary in his mind, Trump will go with what he has been saying privately and tries to become friends with Maduro, like he has done with Kim Jong Un."
Asked about Bolton's claim that Trump said it would be "cool" to invade Venezuela, Cutz says that Trump often says whatever comes to his mind in private meetings, without following up on that and other ideas.
"I'm 100% sure that Trump is not even considering and would not consider for real an invasion of Venezuela," Cutz told me. "This is a president who ran on a platform of opposing foreign wars and who has repeated that even in his speech last week at West Point."
Bolton's book corroborates what we have already heard from former Defense Secretary James Mattis, former Trump chief of staff John Kelly and several others: that Trump has no interest in pushing for U.S. principles such as democracy and human rights, and that he always puts his personal interests ahead of his country's.
If he's reelected, thinks he can meet with Maduro and sell it to the American public as a huge diplomatic victory _ as he's done with the North Korean dictator _ he'll do it. Once the election is over, and Florida no longer matters to him, he'll do whatever makes him look best.
