Donald Trump pleaded with China’s leader Xi Jinping for help to win re-election in 2020, the US president’s former national security advisor John Bolton writes in an explosive new behind-the-scenes book, according to excerpts published Wednesday.
Bolton alleges in a blistering critique that Trump’s focus on winning a second term was the driving principle of his foreign policy, and that top aides routinely disparaged the Republican leader for his ignorance of basic geopolitical facts.
In excerpts published by The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Bolton also claims Trump repeatedly showed a readiness to overlook Chinese human rights abuses — most strikingly telling Xi the mass internment of Uighur Muslims was “exactly the right thing to do.”
“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” Bolton writes of the real estate magnate-turned-president, who was impeached in December for seeking dirt from Ukraine on his 2020 Democratic election rival Joe Biden.
In a key meeting with Xi last June, Trump “stunningly turned the conversation to the US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton claims in his upcoming tell-all.
Bolton writes that Trump stressed the importance of US farmers and how “increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat” could impact the US electoral outcome.
Source: Guardian Newspaper
