President-elect Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, has stated that an international crisis is “much more likely” during the Republican’s second term.
Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, told The Guardian that the president-elect has “inability to focus” and makes decisions based on personal relationships and “neuron flashes.”
“It’s typical Trump: it’s all braggadocio,” Bolton told the publication. “The world is more dangerous than it was during his previous presidency. COVID, a pandemic rather than a specific foreign power, was the only true crisis we faced.
“But the risk of an international crisis of the 19th-century variety is much more likely in a second Trump term,” the politician said. “Given Trump’s inability to focus on coherent decision-making, I’m very worried about how that might look.”
When the 76-year-old joined Trump’s administration, he had prior experience in the defense industry. He was 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 predicted Trump would 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, and the consequences of his decisions—would discipline his thinking in a way that would produce serious outcomes,” The Guardian reported that Bolton had said.
“It turned out I was wrong,” he explained.
“It’s possible that even if I had arrived earlier, I wouldn’t have had any effect because many patterns of behavior had already established themselves by the time I arrived.” But it became clear pretty quickly after I arrived that intellectual discipline was not in the Trump vocabulary.”
Bolton has previously criticized Trump’s cabinet picks, claiming that he chose them based on loyalty rather than philosophies or qualifications.
Bolton told CNN last month, “We often use the word loyalty.” “I think that is the wrong word. Actually, I believe what Trump wants from his advisors is fealty, or a futile sense of subservience.”
“He may get that, but I’ll tell you that won’t serve him well in his next term, and it won’t serve the country well,” he ended.
Bolton left Trump’s administration in September 2019, citing months of disagreements with the Republican. Trump later claimed that he fired Bolton.
Since leaving his administration, Bolton has been a vocal critic of Trump. In 2020, he published The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, a scathing account of his first administration.
“I don’t think he’s fit for office,” Bolton stated in an interview with ABC News about the book’s publication.
“I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job.”