The MeidasTouch Podcast - Former Top Advisor to Trump John Bolton Drops The Hammer on Him (Interview)

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas interviews Ambassador John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump who doesn’t hold back in his scathing criticism of Donald Trump and the disqualifying characteristics of Trump he observed. Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I'm joined by Ambassador John Bolton, who served as Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor. Ambassador, welcome to the show. Glad to be with you.

All right. So how big of a threat, ambassador? I mean, you served as Donald Trump's national security advisor. How big of a threat do you say Donald Trump poses to our national security? Well, I think the basic problem is he's not really fit to be president. He, having served four years, you know, he came into the White House not knowing much about how the government operated, not knowing much about national security, and over a four-year period, he didn't manage to learn very much.

He doesn't appreciate the issues. He doesn't focus on strategy, philosophy, policy. He doesn't do any of that, as many people have observed across the range of government affairs. He's anecdotal, ad hoc, transactional. And worst of all, he sees everything through the prism of how does this benefit Donald Trump. So when you come to trying to make decisions on national security issues, he's not focused on what's at stake for the United States, what our options are, how we can protect our interests in the most effective way. And no president comes into the

office fully equipped for all the challenges they're going to face. The job is too big. But responsible presidents learn and avoid mistakes they've made in the past. For Trump, every day is a new day. That's the way it is said. He ran his real estate business, and maybe that was successful for him. But that's not the way you run the White House. You know, you've worked in other administrations. you've worked in government for a long time. I'm not revealing any state secrets there, I don't think. Did you ever expect anything like this? I mean, has this exceeded even kind of your worst expectations of the depths of kind of the worst possible scenarios seeing Trump? Well, well, it did. I mean, a lot of people say, how could you ever go to work for somebody like that? And very few people have ever called me naive. I had heard pretty much

everything there was that people had said about Trump before I joined the White House. But I believe that like every one of his predecessors, certainly in the national security field, that Trump would be disciplined by the gravity of the issues he faced, the weight of the responsibility, the enormous consequences of where he came down on particular issues. And I found, to my dismay, that he was not disciplined by the gravity of the job that he held. And so trying to keep things moving in a direction, almost moving in any direction consistently proved almost impossible to do. And I would say the number of senior Trump advisors, again, primarily in national security matters, but in many others as well,

who have come to the conclusion that he's really not suitable for the office, I think is unprecedented in American history. And I would just underline, these are not, it's true in my case, but I think it's true in all the others as well. These are not people who are disagreeing with particular policy outcomes on this issue or that issue. I think many of the things, many of the decisions Trump made were correct, but it was like rolling dice, whether you would get him to that point or not.

And that's just not how, particularly in a very challenging time internationally, you want a president to perform. So when so many of his top aides uh decide and say publicly they don't think he should be re-elected i i think that's uh that that's a legitimate cause for concern because you have to ask then who's going to go to work for him in a second term you talk about rolling the dice i think about about the Daisy ad from 1964. I think about the ads about it's 3 a.m. in the morning. You get the phone call. You have to make the decision about whether

there's going to be a nuclear attack. I mean, these are the decisions for people who hold the highest office in our lands. As a former national security advisor and the former national security advisor to Donald Trump? Would you trust Donald Trump with the nuclear codes? Well, you know, he's going to have them if he's president again, whether anybody trusts him or not. That's the way the system works. And I think that's the way it has to work. The president's the ultimate decision maker. But because he doesn't understand what the issues are, what the stakes are in international

affairs, he's really not able to weigh the national security interest effectively. And for example, he has said repeatedly publicly himself, I'm not making this up, this comes out of his own lips, that he sees relations between countries as essentially being equivalent to the personal relationships between the heads of states. So he would say, if I have a good personal relationship with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, then the United States has good relations with Russia or China. Now, I would never totally dismiss personal relations in international or China. Now, I would never totally dismiss personal relations in international affairs or anything else,

but it's simply not accurate to say that if he gets along with Vlad Putin, that we're gonna get along with Russia. And that's the kind of, it's a form of trivialization of what can be some very complex questions that he doesn't bother to get into because he's either not interested in them or doesn't understand them. Did you ever think that in the Republican Party, you'd go from Ronald Reagan, tear down the wall, Mr. Gorbachev to Donald Trump saying, you know, Vladimir Putin, I got a great relationship with him. He's a really good guy. You ever imagine that

when you were kind of coming up in the ranks to be in the National Security Advisor? Well, no, that's pretty clear. In fact, I wouldn't even imagine a Democrat who would say something like that. I mean, you have to go back to Henry Wallace in 1948 to find anybody even comparable at the national level. And you would think over time that Trump would have learned something about what it's like to deal with leaders, adversaries, like Xi Jinping or Putin or Kim Jong-un or the Ayatollah Khamenei or whomever it might be, but he doesn't grow. He doesn't learn. It's the same approach that he pursues on almost anything that comes across his desk.

And I think that's very troubling too, because I do think national security matters endangering the safety of the people of the country ought to be treated differently than more routine matters. And that just never crossed his mind, I don't think. Now, you were recently quoted as saying something to the effect of Donald Trump is more of like a wannabe dictator than a dictator. You think the quote was, he's a property developer, but too stupid to be an actual dictator. One, is that quote accurate?

I think it was translated from an interview you did with the French paper. And can you expound on that if it is correct? Well, you know, I spoke in English, it was translated into French, and then perhaps translated from French back to English. So I can't vouch for it. But what I can say is that,

and I don't get into the shrink area. I'm not going to psychoanalyze Trump. But I think he would like to be less constrained in what he can do with the presidency. And he looks at people like Putin or Xi or Kim, Erdogan of Turkey, and he sees that in those countries, those people basically are unrestrained. And I think he kind of envies it. It also goes to the point I just made a moment ago, because he wants a good personal relationship with that sort of leader, that he'd like to pretend that he's sort of like them too. He's a big guy, does big guy things you know it's it's part part of what advisors are for is to give the president their best judgment when a course that he may want to take and he's human like everybody else when it's just going a bridge too far and and that grates

on him you know if we go back to the 2020 debate one of of the jarring moments was Donald Trump saying, proud boys, stand back and stand by. That was a lot of people remembered that moment. You know, now Donald Trump gives these rallies. The first event he held of the campaign season was in Waco, Texas, but he starts all of these events with the January 6th anthem. He's taken our national anthem he's changed the words and he now sings the song with the january 6th rioters who are in the dc jail some of the most violent of the insurrection is who he calls to free and he calls them hostages how odd how weird how how dangerous is is that rhetoric and what do you make of that? Well, I think it shows Trump believes that he can win simply by mobilizing what he sees as his base. And I think the conduct that he displayed on January the 6th all day long, basically,

alone disqualifies him to be president. None of these people were in the Capitol on any legitimate business. And my own view as a law and order conservative is they all ought to be in jail for a very long period of time. I think January the 6th wasn't the worst of it though. I think later when he said the constitution itself should be suspended so that he could be declared

the winner of the 2020 election. I mean, you're really in fantasy land at this point. But he talked about suspending the Constitution like you would think the ruler of a banana republic would say it. That is disqualifying. And it's obviously disturbing that people don't more widely see it that way, that they say, well, it's just Trump being Trump. And that's the danger. When he says these things, he's actually saying things he believes in, and it sometimes takes him a while.

He talks about it and talks about it and talks about it, but then you find that he then actually acts on these things that he said, like, for example, in the national security area, withdrawing from NATO. People say, well, it's just Trump being Trump. He's bargaining to get the other allies to spend more. I think he's just working himself into the position when he can finally say, today we're getting out. He almost did it in 2018. I think it'd be one of the early priorities of a second Trump term. Yeah. So as Donald Trump's former national

security advisor, you believe that all Americans and everyone should take it very seriously when he says he wants to withdraw from NATO and a second Donald Trump term, you believe would mean almost an immediate withdrawal from NATO. Well, I think he would do it very early in the term. The remedy I would propose to anybody who doesn't want us to withdraw from NATO is find a way to distract his attention. And since he has a short attention span, that can work at least for a while until it pops back into his head. But this is, I think, unfortunately, a very good example of what a second Trump term will be like. A lot of things he talked about in the first term, maybe made some tentative steps toward, but didn't actually carry through on, we'll see again in the second term. And Trump himself says quite frequently on the campaign

trail that he's going to exact retribution against people who he ran afoul of in the first term or after he left office. Now, he cast it in the guise of saying he's protecting his supporters, that he's going to get retribution on their behalf. But make no mistake about it, it will be a retribution presidency on behalf of Donald Trump. Final question, Ambassador. George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, former Vice President Pence, John Bolton, Trump's former Chief of Staff, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, yourself, I could go on. These are people who have worked very closely with Donald Trump or worked for Donald Trump in the highest positions of power

or had the highest positions in the Republican Party are not supporting Donald Trump or are outright saying do not support Donald Trump. What does that tell you? Well, I think it says that the experience of those who served closest to him during his first term believe he's not fit for office. These people are not against Trump because they disagree with this decision or that decision. Certainly they do, but that's what presidents do. They make decisions. Sometimes they follow your advice. Sometimes they don't. It's not a ground to say they're not qualified. But when you see so many people who have experienced working with him on a daily basis on some of these key issues. I would hope that people, as they seriously consider what they're voting on here,

would realize that Trump is a danger and a problem in a second term. Ambassador Bolton, thanks for your time today. We appreciate it. Glad to be with you. All right, everybody, hit subscribe. We're on our way to 3 million subscribers here, and for your time today. We appreciate it. Glad to be with you. All right, everybody, hit subscribe. We're on our way to 3 million subscribers here, and have a wonderful day. Love this video? Make sure you stay up to date on the latest breaking news and all things Midas by signing up to the Midas Touch newsletter at MidasTouch.com slash newsletter.