Donald Trump asked China’s Xi Jinping to help his re-election prospects, according his former national security adviser John Bolton.
In a new book, Mr Bolton claims that the US president asked his Chinese counterpart to purchase more US farm products at a 2019 summit meeting.
Mr Bolton called Mr Trump’s effort to shift the June 2019 conversation to the US election a stunning move.
But he also wrote that it was among innumerable conversations that “formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behaviour that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency”.
Overall, Mr Bolton wrote, because staff had served him so poorly, Mr Trump “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government”.
As for the meeting with the Chinese president in Osaka, Japan, Mr Bolton wrote that Mr Trump told Mr Xi that Democrats were hostile to China.
“He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Mr Bolton said.
“He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”
The Associated Press obtained an advance copy of the book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, which is set to be released next week by Simon & Schuster.
The Trump administration has sued to try to delay publication, saying it contains classified information.
In the book, Mr Bolton describes every Trump decision as being guided by concerns for his own re-election, a claim that evokes the scandal that sparked Mr Trump’s impeachment last year.
Mr Trump’s decision to withhold military assistance to Ukraine until it agreed to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, then a 2020 front-runner and now the presumptive Democratic nominee, led the House to charge Mr Trump was abusing his power.
The aid was ultimately released once the hold-up became public.
The Republican-controlled Senate ultimately acquitted the president on that count and a count of obstructing Congress’s investigation of the incident.
