John Bolton, President-elect Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, said that an international crisis is “much more likely” during the Republican’s second term.
Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, told The Guardian the president-elect has an “inability to focus” and bases his decisions on personal relationships and “neuron flashes.”
“It’s typical Trump: it’s all braggadocio,” Bolton told the outlet. “The world is more dangerous than when he was president before. The only real crisis we had was COVID, which is a long-term crisis and not against a particular foreign power but against a pandemic.”
“But the risk of an international crisis of the 19th-century variety is much more likely in a second Trump term,” he added. “Given Trump’s inability to focus on coherent decision-making, I’m very worried about how that might look.”
The 76-year-old was no stranger to the defense world when he joined Trump’s administration. He served as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security from 2001 to 2005 and Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006.
Bolton said he expected Trump to rise to the occasion during his first term, as many other presidents had done before him.
“What I believed was that, like every American president before him, the weight of the responsibilities, certainly in national security, the gravity of the issues that he was confronting, the consequences of his decisions, would discipline his thinking in a way that would produce serious outcomes,” Bolton told The Guardian.
“It turned out I was wrong,” he continued.
“By the time I got there a lot of patterns of behaviour had already been set that were never changed and it could well be, even if I had been there earlier, I couldn’t have affected it. But it was clear pretty soon after I got there that intellectual discipline wasn’t in the Trump vocabulary.”
Bolton previously slammed Trump’s cabinet picks as well, explaining he was likely selecting them based on loyalty rather than their philosophies or qualifications.
“And the word loyalty is often used,” Bolton told CNN last month. “I think that’s the wrong word. Actually, I think what Trump wants from his advisors is fealty, really a futile sense of subservience.”
“And you know, he may get that, but I will tell you that that will not serve him well over the course of his next term, and it certainly won’t serve the country well,” he continued.
Bolton left Trump’s administration in September 2019, noting he left after months of disagreement with the Republican. Trump later claimed he fired Bolton.
Since leaving his administration, Bolton has been an outspoken critic of Trump. In 2020, he published The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir, a scathing account of his experience serving in his first administration.
“I don’t think he’s fit for office,” Bolton said during an interview with ABC News about the book’s release.
“I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job.”
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