John Bolton’s crusade to debunk Trump’s revisionist history on Russia and Ukraine

And yet all along, one of his top former foreign policy aides has sought — with increasing gusto — to make sure this claim doesn’t go unchallenged.

Yes, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has turned on Trump like many others in Trump’s inner orbit have. His version of events is therefore understandably uncharitable. But if there were one thing that would seemingly earn the gratitude of an uber-hawk like Bolton, pretty high on that list would be Trump’s supposed success in keeping Putin in check.

Bolton has now said repeatedly that this simply isn’t how it went down. And he’s made quite the opposite case: that Putin didn’t do stuff like this during Trump’s presidency because Trump was already doing the work for him — specifically, by undermining NATO. And it’s a case that tracks with plenty of what we already knew, even as few Trump allies-turned-critics have seen fit to weigh in publicly of late.

“In almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it, saying we were being too hard,” Bolton retorted when the host suggested that it was unthinkable that Trump would’ve handled the situation worse than President Biden has. Bolton added that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was.”

In a pair of interviews over the past week, Bolton has expounded.

Last week on Sirius XM, Bolton told host Julie Mason that Putin didn’t need to act against Ukraine because Trump was presenting him with another route: the dismantling of NATO.

“I think one of the reasons that Putin did not move during Trump’s term in office was he saw the president’s hostility of NATO,” Bolton said, adding: “Putin saw Trump doing a lot of his work for him, and thought, maybe in a second term, Trump would make good on his desire to get out of NATO, and then it would just ease Putin’s path just that much more.”

Asked whether we should believe this wouldn’t have happened on Trump’s watch, Bolton said, “Certainly not.” Bolton added that, in a second term unencumbered by future electoral considerations, Trump would’ve been even more freed up to potentially take the United States out of NATO.

“And so Putin would’ve gotten what he wanted in Ukraine for a lot lower price than he’s paying now,” Bolton said.

Then Bolton added, in perhaps his most unvarnished comment to date: “The Leninist phrase is ‘useful idiot,’ and they haven’t forgotten that in Moscow.”

Exactly whether and how much Trump ultimately weakened NATO during his term is a reasonable topic of debate. NATO funding did increase during Trump’s presidency — something he was keen to take credit for as he attacked allies for not ponying up — but it did so on a trajectory similar to the one that predated Trump’s presidency. (The turning point for this was Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.) What’s more, most of the administration’s biggest moves to counter Russia did indeed come over Trump’s objections.

But Bolton’s claim that NATO faced highly uncertain prospects in a second Trump term — and even a possible U.S. exit — is one backed up by years of reporting.

In their book last summer, Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that Trump privately indicated that he planned to pull out in a second term. Advisers cautioned him against doing so in his first term, to which Trump replied, “Yeah, the second term. We’ll do it in the second term.”

And even setting aside NATO, Bolton argues that Trump’s attempts to leverage Ukraine had a lasting impact on preparedness for just such a situation as we now find ourselves in.

“From the summer of 2019 forward … Ukraine was the subject of debate in American politics and had no chance whatever to establish a normal bilateral relationship that could build confidence in Ukraine, and show the Russians that our relations were growing closer and that we very much had Ukraine’s security in mind,” Bolton said Monday.

Bolton said, as he did in a previous interview with Vice News, that this in some ways greased the skids — that “it was one of the reasons Putin didn’t think that we were ready.”

You can mine the comments of many of Trump’s friends-turned-foes for half-measures and ulterior motives. But in contrast to many others and those like Kelly who have chosen to remain largely quiet these days — to play this off as the largely inconsequential rantings of a president out of power — Bolton isn’t mincing words here. And he has long made clear the one thing that motivates him, perhaps above anything else, is combating the likes of Russia. That he would so forcefully and repeatedly take exception to this Trump talking point would seem to say plenty about what it really looked like behind the scenes.