Bolton's Trump exposé was widely pirated before it was even published

Ex-national security adviser John Bolton's upcoming memoir, The Room Where It Happened, went on sale today despite a lawsuit from the White House that tried to block its publication. An injunction likely wouldn't have stopped the book from reaching the masses anyway though, because it was already being widely pirated and distributed online.

Trump was far too late to stop this —TorrentFreak reports that pirated versions started to appear online almost as soon as a judge denied a temporary restraining order against the book. The judge, while agreeing that Bolton may have exposed the country to harm by leaking classified intelligence, said that it was too late to stop the information from getting out. The book had already been circulated to news outlets that were releasing excerpts.

“A single dedicated individual with a book in hand could publish its contents far and wide from his local coffee shop. With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done,” the order reads. Never mind a book in the hand, it's a book in the browser that's really undone the President's attempts to quash it.

Resistance is futile — According to TorrentFreak, links to torrents quickly spread across social media leading to tens of thousands of downloads of the book. The Room Where It Happened even tops the list of most downloaded books on The Pirate Bay. Simon & Schuster, which published the book, has been working furiously to get links taken off Twitter and Google Drive, but trying to censor content on the internet is a fool's errand. Because of the distributed nature of torrenting, when one link is taken down, another surfaces almost immediately.

Bolton is just the latest in a string of Trump administration officials who have left the White House only to publish a book trashing the President's policies, intellect, eating habits, racism, narcissism, or anything else they had the misfortune of witnessing, really.

Ignorance is bliss — In the book, Trump is described as "stunningly uninformed," and Bolton offers an array of examples to support that assertion, including that the sitting president was unaware that the UK is a nuclear power. Considering the UK is one of the U.S.'s closest strategic partners, that sort of ignorance is worrying, if not at all surprising.

The book also makes clear how much Bolton likes the limelight, but if him having a moment in it can help prevent the re-election of the incumbent, so be it. On June 10, Gallup found that the President's approval rating had plummeted 10 points, to 39 percent. That means there's still a long way to fall. But don't fret, November is still a long way away.