On Wednesday’s All In, MSNBC host Chris Hayes bizarrely insisted that the true leader of the Republican Party is John Bolton, not Donald Trump.
Hayes described Bolton as “duplicitous, untrustworthy, extremely militaristic” in his Tuesday night rant on why the American people should trust what Bolton says in his new tell-all book. Hayes also called Bolton “morally odious.” But, the host encouraged, believe the book.
Here’s Hayes spewing his contradictory, hyperbolic anger:
You know, people talk about how the Republican Party has become the party of Donald Trump. But I think really it's the party of John Bolton. More than anyone, Bolton is a perfectly representative figure of the modern Republican Party, indeed of the conservative movement. He served in prominent positions in the last two Republican administrations. He's a vicious bureaucratic infighter. He's duplicitous, untrustworthy, extremely militaristic.
He's never been held accountable for all the terrible things he's done in his long public career, and there are many. He is a completely morally odious individual you would not want in your organization, or anywhere around you. And yet he is of course also a Fox News contributor and at the highest levels of Republican policy making.
The MSNBC host’s spin is incoherent when you think about the differences between Trump and Bolton. Bolton was heavily involved in the Iraq War, which President Trump, and some of his voters, opposed. Bolton is a career bureaucrat, as Hayes highlighted, which is exactly what Trump is not.
The key question is why would the liberal media believe Bolton now? Chris Hayes and the rest of the mainstream media will rush to support him, even though they never have before, simply because it fits their narrative that Trump should be impeached and removed from office; a narrative that begun just minutes after Trump was sworn into office.
A transcript of the segment is below. Click “expand” to read more:
All In with Chris Hayes
06/17/2020
8:18 PM ETCHRIS HAYES: You know, people talk about how the Republican party has become the party of Donald Trump. But I think really it's the party of John Bolton. More than anyone, Bolton is a perfectly representative figure of the modern Republican Party, indeed of the conservative movement. He served in prominent positions in the last two Republican administrations. He's a vicious bureaucratic infighter. He's duplicitous, untrustworthy, extremely militaristic. He's never been held accountable for all the terrible things he's done in his long public career, and there are many. He is a completely morally odious individual you would not want in your organization, or anywhere around you. And yet he is of course also a Fox News contributor and at the highest levels of Republican policy making. Cause that’s the way the Republican Party and the conservative movement are now. Maybe you'll remember that Bolton was one of the people that broke up the White House Pandemic Response Unit. He also advocated strenuously for a totally unjustified war in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people. John Bolton could spend the rest of his life, like Lady Macbeth, trying to wash the blood off his hands and it would be there still. And as a testament to just how remarkably credence this man is, remember last fall when all the evidence was coming out about the president manipulating American foreign policy in an egregiously corrupt manner, abusing his power to dig up dirt on his political opponent. To get a foreign nation to interfere in our elections. And there was a ton of evidence, a lot of it, that John Bolton knew all about it.
His deputy, Fiona Hill, testified before Congress said Bolton called the whole Ukraine affair a drug deal. But rather than answer the call to testify about what he knew under oath in front of the House and the American people, in the midst of an impeachment proceeding, Bolton fought against testifying. Instead he shared his thoughts in a private speech to some rich bankers who paid him for it. He also held out for a two-million-dollar book deal. And now Bolton is attempting to literally cash in on betrayal of his country, again all of which is par for the course of the modern Republican Party. Now the revelations in the book, they have been reported, to the extent you can call them revelations. They're exactly what you would think. Bolton says Trump did not want to send funds to Ukraine until they sent him dirt on Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, just as he was accused of doing and acquitted by Republicans in the Senate. Bolton says, Trump told the Chinese Premier to go ahead and build concentration camps for the country’s Muslim minority. Atta boy. He also says Trump pleaded explicitly face to face with XI, China’s Premier, to quote "ensure he would win the coming election." Wow. Guess what? Donald Trump is exactly as terrible as we thought he was, and John Bolton is exactly who we thought he was as well. Because he didn't say anything about any of this when it happened. He was sitting there all this time. All these horrible things he has now made two million dollars off of. Instead what he did was he lobbied for over a year to get in the position in the administration, then immediately started working on a book he could sell instead of telling the American people they were in grave danger because the country was being run by an immoral brute. There are lots of people that have every reason to be furious at John Bolton, every American citizen, but maybe no one so much as our next guest. Joining me now is Daniel Goldman, who served as counsel for the House Democrats during the impeachment of President Trump. Dan, what do you think about -- I cannot think in my mind of a precedent for this, of someone who has information material as something as high stakes and important as grave as a constitutionally, you know, blessed impeachment proceeding who keeps it so they could sell a seven figure book deal. And then turns around in the book and criticizes Democrats. I want to read you this, this is amazing, “had democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different. Well thanks, John. What do you think, Dan?
DANIEL GOLMAN (IMPEACHMENT COUNSEL): Well, that’s exactly right Chris. We would have loved for John Bolton to come in and tell us about all of the other maleficence and misconduct that the president was entertaining during his, Bolton’s, tenure there, and, in fact, if he had come in and testified as he was requested to do, then we might have expanded the investigation beyond Ukraine. At the end of the day, he chose not to testify. There is no legal reason why he could not testify if he was then going to reveal the same information in a book. The only reason I guess are dollar signs. He's certainly no patriot. But the thing that is so striking about what we're reading about this book and we still have to read the whole thing is how consistent it is with the case that we built.
HAYES: Yes.
GOLDMAN: Bolton not only confirms exactly what all of his lower level employees in the National Security Council and elsewhere are in the government confirmed about Trump abusing his power to essentially extort Ukraine in order to help him with the election, but it was truly what Trump's foreign policy was. It was a foreign policy designed to help with his re-election, and that's -- that is remarkable when you see it as it relates, as you just cited, to China. There is some discussion about how he wanted to overturn U.S. Charges against a large Turkish bank to help Erdogan and Turkey. We'll have to read the book, if people are going to, or at least read the reporting about it to see what else there was, but it is a truly remarkable picture of a President whose sole purpose is to use his power to get himself re-elected.
