Trump ally-turned-whisteblower John Bolton spent 17 months in the president’s administration. Widely described as tough-nosed foreign policy hawk, Bolton insists that…
John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, offered a brutal review of his former employer’s presidency in an interview with ABC News, aired on Sunday.
Bolton, who is set to publish a tell-all memoir about his stint at the White House, expanded on some of the anecdotes from the book and gave a broader picture of a president who is unwilling to learn and is obsessed with re-election.
Check out the highlights of the interview below.
Bolton finds it “unusual” that Donald Trump took part in intelligence briefings just once or twice a week, whereas they should take place every day.
Bolton complains that Trump spoke up too little at the briefings and there were too many people present there. He suggests that Trump didn’t go through a lot of intelligence and generally seemed uninformed on many matters, which made it “almost impossible to sustain a consistent coherent policy over time”.
Bolton’s upcoming memoir, which portrays Trump as being “stunningly uninformed”, contains several claims backing up that account, including one that Trump thought Venezuela was “really part of the United States” (it isn’t) and another that Trump had inquired whether Finland was part of Russia (it isn’t).
The former adviser, who was fired last September over disagreements with Trump on foreign policy, told ABC that Trump also relied heavily on opinions from people who weren’t working in the administration. He lamented there was “an unwillingness on the part of the president…to do systematic learning so that he could make the most informed decisions”.
Bolton believes that the goal of getting re-elected was the “major factor” in every decision Trump made. He says it blindsided the president, who looked for media opportunities like a photo op with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and contemplated the reaction in the press.
“When we were in Singapore for the first summit, one of the things he said over and over again was to ask how many press people were gonna be present for his final press conference,” Bolton recalled.
