Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today is Thursday June 18 2020.

I'm John Pudhord. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always senior editor Abreed Walt. Hi, John.

Senior writer Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John. And associate editor Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah. Hi, John.

So John Bolton's book is now the room where it happened is now in circulation in some form or other Trump administration.

Making some half-hearted or maybe even full-throated last-minute effort to suppress its publication, which is due on Tuesday.

Some like a million copies have been printed. They're all over the place. There's already been an excerpt in the in the Wall Street Journal.

New York Times and Washington Post have stories on what's in the book. They're already excerpts of an ABC news interview with John.

This was to air on Sunday. So the doctrine that was sort of laid out in the Pentagon paper's case, which is that once something is in the public prints, it's in the public prints.

And you you can't sort of suppress it because it's already gotten out.

Though Bolton himself is presumably still liable in some fashion or other. If he has personally broken

laws regarding classified information, nonetheless they can't suppress the release of the book almost certainly.

And have only just added 500,000 copies to its sales numbers. It would appear.

Which is a Trump specialty, by the way. He helped make Michael Wolf's book a giant bestseller. He helped make a Marosa's book a giant bestseller.

And so he has apparently done the same for for John Bolton.

So substantively there seem to be two threads. One thread is Bolton's portrait of Trump as a leader.

And then there's this other thread that if only he had said what he says in the book to the impeachment trial,

there might have been a different result in the impeachment trial. And so he's bad because he even if the book is

revelatory because he didn't say what he could have said at a time when it could have meant that

Republicans would have been forced to remove the president from office, which is it strikes me spectacularly

delusional from what we can tell from the proceeding from what Bolton says at least on the on the Ukraine stuff.

He acknowledges or confirms Fiona Hill's story that he looked at this as being very untoward.

And he adds to the general indictment that Trump was willing to subordinate US policy to his own

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