John Bolton, former National Security advisor to President Trump, has been making the media rounds in recent months promoting his highly critical book on his time in the White House.

For Bolton, his most damning indictment of Trump is that the President viewed every foreign policy decision from a political perspective:  how would it affect his re-election prospects?

John Bolton is displaying naivete about the history of presidential politics.  Donald Trump is unusual in many ways, both good and bad, but was rather common in his concern about re-election.

Consider the following observation from famous political observer Alexis de Tocqueville, published in Democracy in America in1835 (Knopf Edition,1945, page 137).

It is impossible to consider the ordinary course of affairs in the United State, without perceiving that the desire to be re-elected is the chief aim of the President; that the whole policy of his administration, and even his most indifferent measures, tend to this object[;...]