[bitontheslide]

US President Donald Trump sought help from Chinese President Xi Jinping to win re-election, ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton's new book says.

Mr Bolton says Mr Trump wanted China to buy agricultural produce from US farmers, according to details of the forthcoming book previewed by US media.

He also says Mr Trump "remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House".

The Trump administration is trying to block the book from hitting shelves.

Speaking to Fox News Mr Trump said of Mr Bolton: "He broke the law. This is highly classified information and he did not have approval."

"He was a washed up guy," the president added. "I gave him a chance."

John Bolton joined the White House in April 2018 and left in September the following year, saying he had decided to quit as national security adviser. President Trump, however, said he had fired Mr Bolton because he disagreed "strongly" with him.

His 577-page tome, The Room Where It Happened, is due to go on sale on 23 June.

But on Wednesday night, the Department of Justice sought an emergency order from a judge to stop the book's release.

The allegations refer to a meeting between President Trump and President Xi at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in June last year.

"Trump, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election [in 2020], alluding to China's economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he'd win," Mr Bolton wrote.

"He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome."

Farmers make up a key voting bloc and largely supported Mr Trump in the 2016 election.

Speaking on Wednesday evening, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer disputed Mr Bolton's account, saying the request for help with re-election "never happened".

Mr Bolton also mentions an earlier conversation at the summit's opening dinner, in which they discussed the building of camps in China's western Xinjiang region.

Mr Trump said the construction should go ahead as it was "exactly the right thing to do".

China has detained about a million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the camps for punishment and indoctrination.

The Trump administration has been publicly critical of China's treatment of Uighurs, and on Wednesday the president signed legislation authorising US sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for the repression of Muslims in Xinjiang province.

China denies mistreating Uighurs and attacked the US move, calling it malicious and threatening countermeasures.

Mr Bolton says the impeachment inquiry into the president might have had a different outcome this year if it had gone beyond Ukraine and investigated other instances of alleged political interference.

In January, President Trump was impeached for withholding military aid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into starting a corruption investigation into Mr Biden and his son Hunter.

The president denied the wrongdoing and was acquitted after a two-week trial in the Republican-controlled Senate in February, which did not include any witnesses.

Mr Bolton - who was criticised by Democrats for declining to testify to the hearings - does not discuss in the book whether he thinks that Mr Trump's actions on Ukraine were impeachable.

The publication contains a number of other damaging allegations:

Among other things, Mr Trump is alleged to have been unaware that the UK was a nuclear power.

Britain's atomic deterrent came up during a meeting with Theresa May in 2018, when it was mentioned by one of the then-prime minister's officials.

According to the book, Mr Trump said: "Oh, are you a nuclear power?" Mr Bolton said he could tell it "was not intended as a joke".

Mr Trump also once asked his former chief-of-staff John Kelly if Finland was part of Russia, writes Mr Bolton.

Mr Trump said invading Venezuela would be "cool", according to the book, and that the South American nation was "really part of the United States".

But he was less enthusiastic about another invasion. Of the Afghanistan conflict, Mr Trump is quoted in the book as saying: "This was done by a stupid person named George Bush."

Mr Bolton writes that in a May 2019 phone call Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled off a "brilliant display of Soviet-style propaganda" by likening Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, which "largely persuaded Trump".

Mr Putin's objective was to defend his ally, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Mr Bolton writes. In 2018, Mr Trump labelled the leftist Mr Maduro a dictator and imposed sanctions, but he clung to power.

In an interview with ABC News to be broadcast in full this Sunday, Mr Bolton says of Mr Trump: "I think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle."

Mr Bolton writes that many of the president's closest aides privately disparaged him.

When he arrived at the White House, Mr Bolton said Mr Kelly warned him: "You can't imagine how desperate I am to get out of here. This is a bad place to work, as you will find out."

During Mr Trump's 2018 meeting with North Korea's leader, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo passed Mr Bolton a note about the president that said: "He is so full of ****."

He writes that Mr Pompeo, often described as a Trump loyalist, was among aides who considered resigning in disgust in frustration at working for the president.

Mr Bolton writes that the president "saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53086042

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My problem with this is that Bolton chose to remain silent during the impeachment so he could earn more money from his book and he didn't seem to care that Trump was breaking the law all the time while he was in position

[arista]

Yes he is getting revenge

[GiRTh]

Bolton is an asshole. He had to say all of this, under oath, at the impeachemnt trial. Instead he decided to make a bit of coin and release a tell all book. His actions sum up USA right now.

[Tom4784]

Originally Posted by GiRTh

Bolton is an asshole. He had to say all of this, under oath, at the impeachemnt trial. Instead he decided to make a bit of coin and release a tell all book. His actions sum up USA right now.

Pretty much, although even 'Trump supported concentration camps' wouldn't have been enough to convict him, after all, republicans and their supporters are happy enough with the concentration camps in their own country, as long as it 'only' happens to muslims and mexicans then it's all good.

I think we're too far gone for any revelation about Trump to damage his following at this point. The people who still follow him after everything will stand with their fuhrer until the end.

[Oliver_W]

Originally Posted by Dezzy

Pretty much, although even 'Trump supported concentration camps' wouldn't have been enough to convict him, after all, republicans and their supporters are happy enough with the concentration camps in their own country, as long as it 'only' happens to muslims and mexicans then it's all good.

I think we're too far gone for any revelation about Trump to damage his following at this point. The people who still follow him after everything will stand with their fuhrer until the end.

To be "fair" Trump was just carrying on the "concentration camps" from Obama's administration.

[Tom4784]

Originally Posted by Oliver_W

To be "fair" Trump was just carrying on the "concentration camps" from Obama's administration.

Completely wrong.

Obama's administration created a law that would enable the US to separate children from their guardians IF there was suspicion of child trafficking or if they believed the child to be in danger at their 'guardian's' hands. Trump's administration took that law and started separating everyone, it was a law that was only used a few times during the Obama years and now it's been used to justify the mistreatment of thousands of people. The concentration camps are a new thing under Trump's administration because the administration is co-opting places unfit to hold people to keep up with their wanton human rights abuses.

Trump took a rarely invoked law and co-opted it into justification for systematic racial abuse of immigrants. Don't be a fool that tries to blame Obama for this administration's ****-ups when we're four years into Trump's reign.

Trump's ****-ups are purely his own, blaming Obama is pointless at this stage.

[Oliver_W]

Originally Posted by Dezzy

Completely wrong.

Obama's administration created a law that would enable the US to separate children from their guardians IF there was suspicion of child trafficking or if they believed the child to be in danger at their 'guardian's' hands. Trump's administration took that law and started separating everyone, it was a law that was only used a few times during the Obama years and now it's been used to justify the mistreatment of thousands of people. The concentration camps are a new thing under Trump's administration because the administration is co-opting places unfit to hold people to keep up with their wanton human rights abuses.

Trump took a rarely invoked law and co-opted it into justification for systematic racial abuse of immigrants. Don't be a fool that tries to blame Obama for this administration's ****-ups when we're four years into Trump's reign.

Trump's ****-ups are purely his own, blaming Obama is pointless at this stage.

I'm not blaming anyone, just pointing out it's not all Trump's doing. The cages started with Obama's administration, but the family separation did not.

Joe Biden claimed that a key difference between the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump is that Obama didn’t "lock people up in cages."

During the Sept. 12 Democratic presidential debate in Houston, Univision anchor and debate co-moderator asked Biden why Latinos should trust him given the millions of deportations under Obama’s presidency, when Biden served as vice president.

"What Latinos should look at is, comparing this president to the president we have is outrageous, number one," Biden said. "We didn't lock people up in cages. We didn't separate families. We didn't do all of those things, number one."

We’ve noted that Obama did not have a policy to separate families arriving illegally at the border, and that separations under Trump happened systematically as a result of his administration’s policy to prosecute all adults crossing the border illegally.

But Biden mentioned "cages," specifically, and reporting from the time he was vice president described an enclosure for migrant children with that word.

Controversial use of ‘cages’ description

The term "cages" has continuously been used by Democrats in attacks against Trump and the detention of immigrants arriving at the border. The Trump administration says that the facilities it uses are not cages.

The description has been used to refer to chain-link enclosures holding immigrants at border processing facilities during both the Obama and Trump administrations.

Notably, critics of Trump’s "zero-tolerance" policy that resulted in family separations circulated a photo that purportedly showed children face down on the floor behind a chain-link enclosure during Trump’s tenure. However, the photo was from 2014 when Obama was president.

Our fact-check showed the Associated Press photo was taken in 2014 at a Customs and Border Protection facility in Nogales, Ariz. The photo was used in an Arizona Republic article centered on an influx of children arriving at the border unaccompanied by a parent or guardian.

The Arizona Republic article, in part, said:

"They are undocumented. They entered the country illegally. And when they were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, they were shipped to Nogales from overwhelmed processing facilities in Texas.

"But they are still children in cages, not gangsters, not delinquents. Just children, 900 of them, in a makeshift border-town processing center that is larger than a football field."

The article adds that the children are "housed behind 18-foot-high chain-link fences topped with razor wire."

https://www.politifact.com/factcheck...obama-adminis/

[The Slim Reaper]

it's the family separations that's the big thing. Done only to terrorize and send a message to future refugees and asylum seekers. Many of the kids already separated will never see their parents again, and have been abused.

That's like saying; I know I shot that man, but China invented gunpowder, so...

[Tom4784]

Originally Posted by Oliver_W

I'm not blaming anyone, just pointing out it's not all Trump's doing. The cages started with Obama's administration, but the family separation did not.

The difference being that the previous administration only did it with just cause, hence why you didn't have overflowing camps in which children died during Obama's administration.

Trump has corrupted a law in order to try to justify wanton human right's abuse. The concentration camps are his and his alone, to try to pin it on anything other than his administration is just false.

[Tom4784]

Originally Posted by The Slim Reaper

it's the family separations that's the big thing. Done only to terrorize and send a message to future refugees and asylum seekers. Many of the kids already separated will never see their parents again, and have been abused.

That's like saying; I know I shot that man, but China invented gunpowder, so...

Yup, there's a shocking amount of missing children from Trump's 'facilities' and reports of frequent sexual abuse too. More children have died under Trump's care than in decades of border patrol history prior.

The human rights abuse taking place right now can only be contributed to Trump's administration.

[Cherie]

Trump has a 55% disapproval rate now in the USA

[Captain.Remy]