...never high on my list since he first showed up with GWB for an interim appointment to the UN.

His appointment to be National Security Adviser was scary for me---who needs a warmonger next to an erratic "king"?

This morning's NYT has a long article on Bolton, suggesting he is on trump's trail to nowhere land. I'm not sure of that, they maintain that Bolton's "exile" to Mongolia while trump was in Korea is the key indicator. I'd argue that even trump would not drag Bolton along, who has in the recent past urged preemptive strikes against NK. The little round one might not appreciate that.

Independent of my reservations about their assessment of a downward spiral, I did find this of interest:

There is one major issue left on which Bolton could shape history. On Monday, news broke that Iran had breached a limit on how much nuclear fuel it can possess under the 2015 nuclear deal, which the Trump administration abandoned. That comes after months of escalation on both sides, and the threat remains that Bolton could goad an erratic Trump into war.

Standing between us and that apocalyptic possibility is the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been urging Trump away from a military confrontation with Iran. Last month, Carlson used his opening monologue to eviscerate Bolton, calling him a “bureaucratic tapeworm” for whom war is “always good business.” In normal administrations, national security advisers have more authority than cable news hosts, but it was Carlson, not Bolton, who was with Trump at the Korean Demilitarized Zone this weekend. (Carlson later called into “Fox & Friends” and rationalized North Korean atrocities, saying that leading a country “means killing people.”)

It’s nightmarish to live in a country where our foreign policy has been reduced to an intramural battle between Fox News reactionaries. And there’s still a danger that Bolton could outmaneuver the isolationists. But right now there is a thin, bitter consolation in knowing that he, like so many others who’ve worked for Trump, sacrificed his principles for power and will likely end up with neither.