As President Trump's National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of his 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves. The result is a “caustic and revelatory” (The New Yorker) White House memoir that stands as the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump administration, and one of the few to date by a senior official. With near-daily access to the President, John Bolton has produced a precise depiction of his days around the Oval Office. What Bolton saw shocked him: a President for whom re-election was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation.

“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” he writes. In fact, he argues that the House committed malpractice during the impeachment process by narrowly focusing on Ukraine, while Trump's transgressions spanned the full range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what they were as well as the efforts by him and others in the Administration to ring the alarm about them.

He portrays a President addicted to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply suspicious of his own Government. In Bolton's account, all of this contributed to driving Trump down an odd path toward impeachment. “The differences between this presidency and those I had served previously were stunning,” writes Bolton, who worked for Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43. He found a President who believed foreign policy was like closing a real estate deal—about personal relationships, showmanship made for television, and advancing his own interests.

As a result, the U.S. lost an opportunity to deal with its deepest threats, and in places like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, ended up in a more fragile position. The “first tell-all memoir from a senior official of such rank” (The New York Times) begins with his long journey to the West Wing of the White House, as Trump and others pursued him for the role of National Security Advisor. From the moment he lands, he faces the chemical weapons attack in Syria's Douma, and the crises never stop afterward.

As he writes in the opening pages, “If you don’t like turmoil, uncertainty, and risk - all while being constantly overwhelmed by information, decisions to be made, and a never-ending workload - and surrounded by international and domestic personality conflicts and egos beyond description, try something else.” The turmoil, conflicts, and egos are all present—from the turmoil in Venezuela, to North Korea's Kim Jong Un's capricious and manipulative moves, to showdowns at G7 meetings, Iran's calculated belligerence, the insane plan to bring the Taliban to Camp David, and the offer of an authoritarian regime in China that ultimately exposes the world to its deadly lies. Yet this experienced public servant also has a keen eye for the game being played in Washington, and his story is sprinkled with humor and irony about how he saw it unfold.

Pages: 608, Year of Publication: 2025, Dimensions: 15.2x15.2cm