When Donald Trump stopped an Oval Office briefing to inquire as to why he should “give a fuck” about the fate of Kurds in Syria, he shocked both his own national security adviser and a group of Republican congressmen and women.
Adam Kinzinger, a Republican representative from Illinois until this year, writes in a new book, “Nothing we said worked.”
“I had two lingering impressions when I departed. One was the dejected expression on [adviser John] Bolton’s face as Trump continued to have difficulty concentrating. The other was when Trump remarked, “Why would I give a fuck?” regarding the Kurds in Syria.
Kinzinger was one of two anti-Trump Republicans on the House January 6 committee, along with Liz Cheney. In Wyoming, Cheney lost her seat to a Trump backer. Kinzinger left Congress to retire. Since then, he’s created Country First, an organization aimed at thwarting radicalism among Republicans. Next week will see the publication of his book, Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country.
Trump’s aversion to briefings and his frequent, obscene outbursts have been well documented. Just to name two notable instances from the field of international policy, he was rumored to have referred to Haiti and African nations as “shitholes” and, upon his resignation, to have told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “Fuck him.”
Bolton was hired in March 2018 and dismissed in September of the same year, making him Trump’s third national security adviser. In his biography The Room Where It Happened, Bolton provided a detailed description of his time working there, which was released in 2020.
Trump allegedly wanted Bolton to be “taken out” by Covid and attempted to halt the publishing of that large tome. By contrast, Kinzinger’s account of Trump’s unwillingness to accept his briefing on the Kurds in Syria from the Oval Office
Kinzinger goes to Bolton, another White House factotum who attempted and failed to restrain his president, after discussing how the duties of serving as Trump’s second chief of staff appeared to have depleted the former Marine Corps general John Kelly.
According to Kinzinger, Cheney was also a member of a small delegation that Bolton brought to the White House to encourage Trump to give attention to the Kurds in Syria, US allies who could be left behind to face Turkish aggression while the president attempted to withdraw US forces from the area. Kinzinger now states that Richard Hudson of North Carolina and Dan Crenshaw of Texas also attended.
“I could see that Trump was impatient and that Bolton was desperate for someone to get through to him once we got to the Oval Office,” the author says.
An articulate scholar, Bolton struggled to maintain decorum while Trump appeared indifferent. Bolton remarked, “The Kurds had fought and died for us in Iraq.” They were still offering insightful commentary on local politics. Nothing we tried seemed to work.
In the end, Trump issued the US departure order. He used the argument that the Kurds “didn’t help us in the second world war, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example – they mention the names of different battles, they weren’t there” to defend his decision to give up on them.
« How To Generate Income With Intelligent Automation‘Up to their eyeballs’ in demands for assistance is the federal agency that assists institutions in defending against possible physical threats. »
