Former US National Security Advisor, John Bolton has eviscerated President Donald Trump in his first major interview ahead of the release of his much-anticipated book about his time in the White House.
In an unrestrained break with his former boss, Bolton said he wouldn’t be voting for President Trump this November, adding that he hoped he would be a one-term President.
“The Room Where It Happened” is due out on Wednesday after a Federal Judge rejected an administration request to block its release.
While Bolton is being criticised from the left for refusing to cooperate with their impeachment investigations into the president, or from the right for breaking ranks with Republicans less than five months from election day, he describes a president who is erratic, behaved irrationally, saw conspiracies behind a rock and was stunningly uninformed, in an exclusive interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz.
“I don’t think he’s fit for office. I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job. There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for Donald Trump’s re-election.”
RADDATZ: You say that you were astonished by what you saw. A president for whom getting re-elected was the only thing that mattered even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation.
BOLTON: Well, I think he was so focused on the re-election that longer-term considerations fell by the wayside. So, if he thought he could get a photo opportunity with Kim Jong Un at the demilitarized zone in Korea, there was considerable emphasis on the photo opportunity and the press reaction to it and little or no focus on what such meetings did for the bargaining position of the United States.
In allowing the book’s publication to proceed, a Federal Judge did warn that Bolton could be in jeopardy of forfeiting his two million dollar advance and could face further litigation for publishing a book before receiving final clearance from the White House over classified information that might be contained therein – something Bolton lawyers have rejected, while the Top Democrat in Congress Speaker Nancy Pelosi also weighed in.
“President Trump, by dint (virtue) of what we saw in the impeachment, by what others are being quoted as saying in terms of leaders in the president’s own administration, President Trump is clearly, ethically unfit and intellectually unprepared to be the president of the United States. That doesn’t seem to matter to the Republicans in the United States Senate. It didn’t seem to matter to John Bolton. He chose royalty over patriotism.”
President Trump, who this weekend rallied in Tulsa, Oklahoma in front of an underwhelming crowd with rows of empty seats, tweeted that Bolton was a despicable man who was washed-up until he was brought into the White House – a question put to his spokesperson Kayleigh Mcenany.
REPORTER: Kayleigh, why does the president keep hiring people who are dumb as a rock, overrated, way over their heads, wacko and incompetent?
“So, the president makes hiring decisions based on the fact that he likes to have countervailing viewpoints. I spoke to him this morning about the hiring of John Bolton in particular, and he said, ‘I like to counterbalance my own opinion with individuals that often times have the very opposite opinion of my own.’ He likes the model of having a ‘team of rivals’ like what we saw in President (Abraham) Lincoln’s administration. I’ve been a part of that. I often see rigorous debate and the president uses his gut and makes the best decision as to how to move forward. So, that’s what goes into his hiring practices. And I think the team of rivals with President Lincoln worked quite well.”
The Room Where it Happened – already topping Amazon’s Bestseller List.
