'What John Bolton has done is shred executive privilege for future presidents'

President Donald J. Trump disembarks Air Force One on his arrival Saturday, June 20, 2020, to Tulsa International Airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Official White House photo by Tia Dufour)

John Bolton, who served as President Trump's national security adviser, has destroyed executive privilege for presidents, according to longtime security expert K.T. McFarland.

In his book scheduled for release this week, "The Room Where It Happened," Bolton claims Trump has no guiding foreign policy philosophy other than his re-election. Some who were "in the room" with him dispute that, along with his former chief of staff.

"There will no longer be such a thing as an off-the-record conversation between a president and his advisers, McFarland wrote in a commentary at Fox News. "Everything, every speculation, every offhand remark will be fair game for the next kiss-and-tell book."

She said Bolton and Trump "clashed from the beginning – not just over policy, but in style and temperament."

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When Bolton didn't get his way, she said, he "took to the phone. He became the 'anonymous source' for reporters, dishing out tales of White House chaos and presidential incompetence."

K.T. McFarland (Fox News screenshot)

She said she knew it wasn't going to end well, citing an Election Day 2016 conversation  she and Bolton had in the green room at Fox News in Manhattan.

The two discussed the election and Bolton confirmed he voted for Trump.

"I asked John if he had already voted, to which he replied, 'Yes, for Trump. He’s an idiot, but anybody is better than Hillary Clinton,'" she reported.

She said that when Bolton lobbied the Trump administration for a job, her doubts resurfaced.

"First, they had very different approaches to foreign policy. Trump’s first priority was to rebuild the economy, then use it as leverage to renegotiate trade deals. He would use the bully pulpit to get our security allies to increase their contributions to our mutual defense."

She said Trump didn't want to get the nation "bogged down in more forever wars."

And they clashed, "not just over policy, but in style and temperament," she said.

McFarland worked in the White House under President Nixon and served as an aide to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. She also worked for the National Security Council and the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

She was a speechwriter in the Pentagon under President Ronald Reagan's secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, and later appointed assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in 1983.

She also served Trump as deputy national security adviser.

There was a touch of narcissism on Bolton's part, she wrote.

"Bolton was so convinced of his superior intelligence that he was condescending to everyone, including the president. He was increasingly isolated within the West Wing; cabinet officers ignored him and went behind his back directly to the president. He even avoided contact with his own National Security Council staff," she said.

"I heard from several of my former NSC colleagues who remained at the White House after I left that Bolton spent most of his time – when he wasn’t in the Oval Office – sitting in his office behind closed doors. His staff wasn’t sure what he did for those hours on end. Now we know – he was, in all likelihood, turning his copious notes into a manuscript, presumably in anticipation of getting a lucrative book deal, and rushing it into print quickly when the inevitable happened and he was fired."

She pointed out that much of the book talks about what Trump thought about doing when "he was letting off steam or fantasizing about settling scores with fake news or the deep state."

"That’s classic Trump," she said.

"President Trump uses those meetings as brainstorming sessions. He is not a passive recipient of information; he immediately takes charge of a briefing and takes it in the direction he wants. He tosses out ideas, the more out-of-the-box the better, and expects others to do the same. These meetings are free-for-alls, with everybody weighing in," she said.

The reality, she said, is Trump "says a lot of things, he tweets a lot of things, he changes his mind, he cajoles one minute and criticizes the next, he rants."

But she said the key is to watch what he actually does.