Another White House memoir is surfacing, and this time John Bolton is on the receiving end of criticism. In an excerpt of Speaking for Myself obtained by Axios, former press chief Sarah Sanders calls Bolton "a classic case of a senior White House official drunk on power, who had forgotten that nobody elected him to anything." She uses an anecdote from President Trump's visit to London last year to illustrate the point. A team from the White House "loaded onto a small black bus" en route to the US ambassador's residence, but "Bolton apparently felt too important to travel with the rest of us," she writes. "We waited and watched as Bolton sped by and left us in the dust. The discussion on the bus quickly moved ... to how arrogant and selfish Bolton could be, not just in this moment but on a regular basis."
Sanders makes a point to note that Treasury chief Steven Mnuchin was on the small bus. Later, at the ambassador's residence, Sanders writes that chief of staff Mick Mulvaney unloaded on Bolton, calling him a "f------ self-righteous, self-centered son of a b----!" The explosion "was the culmination of months of Bolton thinking he was more important and could play by a different set of rules than the rest of the team," writes Sanders. In response to all this, an adviser to Bolton says all travel arrangements on the trip were arranged by the Secret Service, not by the former national security adviser. Also on Monday, Trump continued his own criticism of Bolton, again calling him a "wacko" and saying he turned out to be "grossly incompetent" and a "liar." (Trump won't be getting Bolton's vote in November, but neither will Joe Biden.)