The White House memoir is withering in its scorn for Mulvaney. Bolton describes a conversation with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom he says “thought Mulvaney would do essentially whatever Ivanka [Trump] and [Jared] Kushner wanted him to do” as acting chief of staff, “which worried both of us philosophically.”
Bolton also suggests Mulvaney may have concocted the scheme to withhold military aid from Ukraine in exchange for political favors, and accuses his former colleague of leaking disparaging stories about him.
Bolton is far from the first former senior administration official to offer an unflattering account of Trump’s conduct in office. Former White House chief of staff John Kelly, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and others have all made critical comments regarding the president’s leadership.
But Mulvaney argued Friday that many of those former officials “are folks who are either in the military or actively involved in the military,” judging that the “military personality is just not the type that works well with Donald Trump, who’s a small businessman who’s done extraordinarily well.”
Kelly and Mattis are retired Marine Corps generals, and Spencer was a Marine Corps captain who went to work on Wall Street after leaving active duty. Tillerson, however, was CEO of ExxonMobil before joining the administration and has no military background.
Although Trump famously vowed during his 2016 White House run to only “hire the best people” as president, he has unceremoniously ousted numerous high-ranking officials and routinely disparaged their intellects and job capabilities after they made negative assessments of him.
Trump has also struggled to square his hiring pledge with the prosecutorial results of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which ensnared his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, longtime informal political adviser Roger Stone and various other close allies.
