Episode 14: What Would a Second Trump Presidency Mean for the World?
When he first ran for president, Donald Trump didn’t have any record on foreign policy. Now he does, and that offers more than a hint of how he might lead if he were to win the White House again in 2024. Peter dissects the Trump record with one of the ex-president’s best-known former foreign policy advisors — and critics — John Bolton, who doesn’t mince words in assessing Trump’s handling of Russia and China, Ukraine and Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea. Bolton takes us around the world and on the roller coaster ride that was the West Wing of the Trump White House.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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[THEME MUSIC FADES UP]
John Bolton: I describe my time in the White House as like working inside a pinball machine. Getting through the fog of disinformation that often surrounded him was an important task. If your focus is limited to the attention span of a fruit fly, then you're not gonna see the larger issues.
That’s the voice of former President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor describing what it was like to work for his boss. John Bolton was ‘in the room’ with Trump almost every day for a year-and-a-half.
John Bolton: There was great disorder in decision making when it finally got into the Oval Office.
Bolton served as National Security Advisor from April 2018 to September 2019, witnessing history and participating in it, until he was pushed out and became a vocal Trump critic. He’s also a lightning rod, one of the most hawkish policy makers of our era, who has called for preemptive wars against U.S. enemies. He’s blunt, combative, and divisive, and he owns that as proudly as his trademark walrus-like moustache. Love him or hate him, John Bolton is well-positioned to critique Donald Trump.
John Bolton: The trouble with Trump was he didn't really know what his objectives were. He didn't know how to get there.
Trump is now the leading contender for next year’s Republican presidential nomination. So, what might another Trump term mean for America’s place in the world?
John Bolton: He would fundamentally reexamine the premise of NATO.
You’ll hear from Bolton what he thinks Trump got wrong.
John Bolton: He wasn't entirely sure whether Ukraine was part of Russia.
And what he got right.
John Bolton: Trump understood that China had taken advantage of the United States and the West for many, many decades, stealing intellectual property and the like.
And how hard it is to know what Trump’s agenda really is.
John Bolton: You could get a decision in the morning that he'd reverse by the afternoon.
If you ask the question, ‘What kind of global leader would Trump be, if he gets a second term? Who better to try to answer that than John Bolton?
I'm Peter Bergen. and this is In the Room.
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The son of a Baltimore firefighter, John Bolton graduated from Yale Law School and then served at senior levels for three Republican presidents before Trump, Reagan and the two Bushes.
Peter Bergen: What's it like to be in the room with President Trump?
John Bolton: Trump was different from any other president I've served, and I think different from any other American president. I think he was an aberration. I don't think he knew much about the government when he was sworn in. I don't think he cared to learn very much, and I think when he left, he didn't know much more than the day he walked in the door. So, trying to deal with that kind of president was certainly unprecedented for me, but I think unprecedented for the country as a whole.
Peter Bergen: Put us in the room. How well prepared was he? Was he listening to anybody that was telling him anything?
John Bolton: He typically would arrive in the Oval Office between 10:30 and 11:00 in the morning. I had once read that in his real estate business he never set a schedule. He would come into his office every morning and say, ‘Well, what's the day gonna bring today?’ And that was pretty much the approach he brought to the White House. It was difficult certainly in the national security area to have a coherent policy, to develop the policy, to follow the policy, to implement the policy, and to review it, because every day was a new day.
Peter Bergen: The President's Daily Brief is kind of a key document, the intelligence briefing that the president is given typically every day. I mean, was he tuning into that?
John Bolton: He did not read the Daily Brief, which is, it's up to the president. The president can receive information any way he wants. But Trump would spend as much time talking at the briefings as he would listen to the briefer, and the bigger the audience in the room, the more talking he did. And it recalled to me Lyndon Johnson's famous statement: ‘I find I don't learn very much when I'm talking.’
That seems to bear out with Trump, at least in Bolton’s telling. Despite all that talking, there were many things Trump didn’t seem to understand about the world.
John Bolton: He wasn't entirely sure whether Ukraine was part of Russia. He had heard Finland was not independent. He'd hear things from people who were random members of the Mar-a-Lago Club or people he had run into, and he thought, because he had heard something that he hadn't necessarily heard from us or another authoritative person, that it must be really important. So, getting through the fog of disinformation that often surrounded him was an important task. I describe my time in the White House as like working inside a pinball machine. It had little or no structure, and it was very difficult to carry on the normal decision making of government.
Peter Bergen: Explain what that really meant in practice.
John Bolton: There was great disorder in decision making when it finally got into the Oval Office. You could get a decision in the morning that he'd reversed by the afternoon. Typically, I found that arguing on the substance was not the way to persuade him. Arguing why it was his political benefit would persuade him. Now, of course, every president takes political factors into account. There’s simply no question about it. People should realize that is life in Washington. But, I think, Trump was unique in essentially taking only political and personal factors into account.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: Is diplomacy by tweet a good idea?
John Bolton: Any communication that you engage in in the national security space should be pursuant to a strategy. So, the answer is, ‘Yes, it could be, depending on what your objective is.’ Trump's only objective is to Tweet, and that's just not consistent with strategy.
Bolton says that in addition to not operating with a clear strategic vision, Trump had no clue about how to actually make policy.
John Bolton: Trump didn't care about policy as that word is normally understood in Washington and most other capitals. He didn't have a philosophy. He didn't try and formulate policy. I described his decisions as an archipelago of dots. Now, you can try and connect them if you want to, and certainly that's what we had to try and do to carry out the normal functions of government, but it just was really not of much concern to him.
Peter Bergen: Is America First a kind of coherent set of ideas?
John Bolton: Well, it's sort of like a set of neuron reactions that can vary from day to day. Donald Trump's absolute center of attention is Donald Trump, and as Charles Krauthammer once said, he said, ‘You know, I made a big mistake about Trump. I used to think he acted like a 10-year-old, but after watching for a while, I realized he's really like a one-year-old who sees everything through the prism of ‘How does this benefit me?’
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Bolton and Trump disagreed plenty over decisions and over process, such as it was. One moment of tension came in June 2019, when Iran shot down an American drone.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Iran's foreign ministry described that U.S. drone as a ‘provocation’ and that by shooting it down they are, quote, ’Sending a clear and precise message to America.’
Trump had to decide if and how to respond, and at first, the White House decision making seemed to be going along fairly conventionally.
John Bolton: We had, in response to the shooting down of the drone, I think, one of the most classical exercises of national security process. We went through everything, including at the meeting the morning when the decision was made of what the casualty effect would be, and everything was taken into account, and he made the decision to authorize the retaliation.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
But then, like a pinball, Trump abruptly changed his mind. He claimed in a tweet, quote, “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate… 10 minutes before the strike, I stopped it.”
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Unclear exactly what caused the president to pull back the operation relatively late in the game.
Peter Bergen: Why were you unhappy about it? Was he right, you know, not to do this? It was a response to an unarmed drone being shot down by the Iranians, so it wasn't a response to an American death. It was, he felt it was disproportionate.
John Bolton: Toward the end of the day, a White House lawyer who had gotten information from Pentagon lawyers ran into the President and said, ‘But you're gonna kill 150 people. It had nothing to do with reality, since we were gonna attack at night, when the areas would be unmanned. But Trump called the attack off. This is a perfect example of what was wrong with the Trump process. This lawyer should never have gone in there. This is decision-making on such an ad hoc basis that people say, ‘Well, but he decided not to attack.’ The next time he might have decided to attack. Is that the way you want decisions to be made?
Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip approach converged with his lack of knowledge many times, according to Bolton, quite notably in Helsinki, in July 2018, when Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Thank you. I have just concluded a meeting with President Putin on a wide range of critical issues for both of our countries.
Trump stood next to Putin and publicly defended him against evidence that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It was an extraordinary moment: an American president siding with a major global rival against the conclusions of his own intelligence community.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be… President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.
Peter Bergen: Have you solved the mystery of Trump's coddling of Putin?
John Bolton: I don't understand it. I think for whatever reason he himself said it before we left on the trip that included the Helsinki Summit, he said to the press corps outside the White House before getting on the helicopter, ‘You know, it could be, the meeting with Putin will be the easiest meeting of all.’ Who would think that? And Donald Trump could think that.
Trump had campaigned on a promise of being a great dealmaker, but his record as president hardly shows that. For instance, he expended a lot of effort to try and stop the North Korean nuclear program. It’s a goal that had eluded U.S. presidents going back to Bill Clinton. Trump believed his dealmaking skills and personal rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un would get results.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I have a very good relationship with him. Different kind of guy, but he probably thinks the same thing about me. We have a different kind of relationship. We have a very good relationship. And there’s no war.
John Bolton: He felt everything was built up in the personal relationship that he would have with foreign leaders, and that it was the rapport between the two leaders that made the difference. So, he didn't need to be burdened with a lot of facts or information. He could cut deals because after all, that's what he did for a living. Trump would give away things to show he was in charge as much as anything without thinking, ‘What am I gonna get in return for it?’ Or ‘What exactly is the cost of giving up what I want?’ So, Kim Jong Un would complain about joint South Korean-U.S. military maneuvers, maneuvers we've been doing for decades. He didn't understand that if you don't train together things can go badly wrong.
Peter Bergen: Trump announces, ‘We're no longer gonna do these exercises,’ which have been going on for decades with the South Koreans and the United States, and Kim's reaction, I think, is pretty telling. Do you recall what it was?
John Bolton: Sure, he broke out laughing, and you know, it may have been a nervous reaction, who knows? I'm not a shrink, I don't do shrink diagnoses, but typically when somebody's laughing, they're either laughing with you or at you, and I think they were laughing at Trump.
Peter Bergen: Do you think Kim kind of identified Trump as sort of an easy mark?
John Bolton: I think he thought he was a fool.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: He wrote me beautiful letters, and they're great letters. We fell in love.
Peter Bergen: Did you ever get a chance to read the Kim ‘love letters?’
John Bolton: Well, the letters themselves were read as though they were written by somebody in the North Korean Workers Party Agitprop Bureau. But only Trump, because they flattered him and appealed to his ego, could think they were love letters.
Peter Bergen: The content was, ‘You're a great guy, and we're gonna do a deal? I mean, what extent can you talk about it?
John Bolton: ‘Only you and I can do this.’ That kind of thing. It was nothing. There were no state secrets in it. If somebody had leaked those letters, and they were published in a prominent American newspaper, it would've been about as embarrassing to the United States as you can imagine.
Yet, these ‘love letters’ yielded nothing. While Trump was in office, the North Koreans continued producing enriched uranium and tested short-range ballistic missiles in violation of United Nations’ resolutions. They also developed hard-to-detect submarine-launched missiles. So much for the art of the deal.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Major breaking news tonight. The fall of Kabul, as the Taliban completes its takeover of Afghanistan.
Although Joe Biden is the president who oversaw the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, followed by the immediate Taliban takeover, it was Trump who’d laid the groundwork for this debacle. In Trump’s ‘peace’ deal the democratically-elected Afghan government was completely shut out. The Trump Administration instead dealt directly with the Taliban, which had ruthlessly ruled Afghanistan and given safe harbor to al-Qaeda before 9/11. The Taliban got everything they wanted without giving much in return besides agreeing not to attack U.S. forces as they withdrew. But that was an easy concession, since all the Taliban really wanted was for the Americans to get out. Team Trump also agreed to the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Meanwhile, the one American hostage being held by the Taliban remained in captivity.
Peter Bergen: What did you make of the negotiations with the Taliban?
John Bolton: I thought it was a disaster from start to finish. The key mistake that was made was the decision to proceed with direct U.S. negotiation with the Taliban without involving the government of Afghanistan, a government that we had essentially helped create, that was the legitimate voice, imperfect to be sure, but the legitimate voice of the Afghan people. You know, we say as a matter of policy we don't negotiate with terrorists, but that's exactly what we did, and when the final deal with Taliban was cut, the government of Afghanistan was told in effect, ‘Here it is.’ So, when people say, ‘Well, how is it possible the government of Afghanistan, the Afghan Army, collapsed so rapidly?’ Because people had known they were utterly irrelevant to the negotiation process. We undercut the legitimacy of the government we had spent 20 years trying to build up. It was a betrayal, in my view, of the Afghan people and our own 20 years of effort.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: What do you think he got right?
John Bolton: Well, I think he did make a lot of decisions I agreed with, for example, leaving the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, which I worked very hard to accomplish in my first month in office, I think was right.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: In a few moments, I will sign a presidential memorandum to begin reinstating U.S. nuclear sanctions on the Iranian regime. The United States no longer makes empty threats. When I make promises, I keep them.
Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal despite a U.S. intelligence community assessment that Iran was abiding by it, enriching uranium only to around four percent, far below the ninety percent enrichment level required to produce a nuclear weapon. International inspectors also found that Iran was sticking to the deal. But that wasn't enough for Trump, who’d campaigned against it. Bolton shared Trump’s skepticism that Iran was actually keeping its promises and believed that Iran shouldn’t be allowed to have any nuclear program.
John Bolton: The fundamental problem was not the violations of the deal, of which there were many, but the basic idea that Iran would be allowed any capacity to enrich uranium at all. When these negotiations began by France, Germany, and Britain in 2002, 2003, the EU3, as we called them then, said to President Bush that it was an absolute prerequisite that the deal they would cut with Iran would mean no uranium enrichment at the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle and no plutonium reprocessing at the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, the two routes to fissile material for nuclear weapons. That was the precondition. That lasted up until the Obama administration, when it became clear Iran wouldn't agree to a deal unless they could do uranium enrichment. And so, the United States caved.
However, since pulling out of the nuclear deal, Iran has only gotten closer to possessing nuclear weapons. As of January, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran has enough enriched uranium for ‘several nuclear devices.’ Iran’s advancing nuclear program sets up the possibility of a nuclear arms race with Iran’s neighbors in the Persian Gulf.
Peter Bergen: Do you think we're gonna see a nuclear arms race in the Gulf?
John Bolton: I think there's a nuclear arms race in the Gulf underway. It's in the guise of building up civil nuclear power programs. The more scientists and technicians who deal with civil nuclear power, who deal with nuclear research, the more able they are to step very quickly into a weapons program.
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Another important milestone during Trump's presidency was the collapse of ISIS and the elimination of its geographical caliphate in Syria and Iraq. A key moment in the downfall of the terrorist group was Trump ordering the Special Operations raid in which ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died, in 2019.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Capturing or killing Baghdadi has been the top national security priority of my administration.
Peter Bergen: An area that Trump seemed to get right is the campaign against ISIS. The operation in which al-Baghdadi was killed. Can you reflect on that at all?
John Bolton: I think that Trump inherited a very flawed game plan, but it was carried through in the last territorial control ISIS had disappeared. It didn't mean ISIS was eliminated as a terrorist group.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: The Trump Administration did seem to get the measure of China fairly correct?
John Bolton: Well, I think Trump understood that China had taken advantage of the United States and the West for many, many decades, stealing intellectual property and the like. But I don’t think he had any sense of the strategic issues in question.
The Trump administration took a much more skeptical approach to China than previous U.S. administrations. China was making significant advances economically and militarily, in part by stealing American secrets, like the blueprints for the F-35 fighter jet. Trump’s 2017 national security strategy asserted that the Chinese were, quote, ‘building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own.’ The Trump administration also abandoned the delusion that engagement with China and rising prosperity there would cause the authoritarian Communist regime to liberalize.
Peter Bergen: Biden is sort of following much the same policy on China now that Trump laid out, taking this much more skeptical approach to China.
ARCHIVAL Joseph Biden: We’re not looking to decouple from China, we’re looking to de-risk and diversify our relationship with China. It means resisting economic coercion together and countering harmful practices that hurt our workers. It means protecting a narrow set of advanced technologies critical for our national security.
John Bolton: Look, I think there's a broader bipartisan consensus today on the threat China poses across the whole range of human activity — economic, political, and military. China's belligerence is a real threat to the United States and its allies on a global basis, and the visit Xi Jinping made to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin sealed what I think is a new axis that we're gonna have to deal with for the rest of the century.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: Do the thought experiment where, let's say, Trump is elected in 2024, which is not unreasonable given where he is against his other Republican potential rivals. What would it mean for the world, writ large, if he was reelected?
John Bolton: Well, I think it would result in a huge diminution of the American presence in the world. I think that would lead to destabilization and increased anarchy. I think it would mean economic retreat around the world, and I think the consequences would be very severe. What Trump has also said in recent months is that he would fundamentally reexamine the premise of NATO, which is the predicate for what I think he would do in a second Trump term, which is withdraw the United States from NATO itself.
Trump often said that countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — NATO — needed to spend much more money on their own defense.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: My administration has demanded that all members of NATO finally meet their full and fair financial obligation.
Peter Bergen: You were in the room with him multiple times when he was threatening to pull out of NATO?
John Bolton: Yeah, there was no doubt in my mind that that's what he wanted to do, and at the key meeting of the NATO summit in the summer of 2018, he called me up to the table and said, ‘Should I do it?’ And I said something like, ‘Put your foot right up on the line, but don't go over the line.’ And he shook his head, and I went back to my seat. I had no idea whether I had impressed him or not. I think the result was he did put his foot over the line, but he took it back.
It’s hard to overstate what a massive shift in the world order a U.S. pullout of NATO would mean. Trump’s own Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, called NATO, ‘the most successful and powerful military alliance in modern history.’ That's because after World War Two, a U.S.-led alliance of Western democracies formed to contain the Soviet Union. It’s been a remarkable deterrent to aggression against any of its members.
Only after 9/11 did NATO, for the first and only time in its history, invoke Article 5, the collective right to self-defense, that an attack on one is an attack on all. As a result, British, Canadian, French, and German soldiers fought in the Afghan War, and hundreds of them died alongside their American counterparts. NATO’s value was further underscored after Russia invaded Ukraine last year. Though Ukraine is not a NATO member, NATO advisors trained Ukrainian military, and member-nations, led by the Biden Administration, supplied Ukraine with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. The one person who might be more pleased by the demise of NATO than Trump is Vladimir Putin.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I got along with him great. Had I been president, he would've been much better off, because he wouldn't have gone into Ukraine. But ultimately he's gonna take over all of Ukraine.
That's a prediction that diverges completely from current U.S. policy, which is full-throttled support for Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his quest to push back Russian aggression. In a forum on CNN, in May, Trump dodged the question of whose side he’s actually on.
ARCHIVAL Reporter: Do you want Ukraine to win this war?
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I don't think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled, so we stop killing all these people.
I asked Bolton what he thinks Trump's approach to Putin would be, if he were to get a second term.
John Bolton: Well, he has said, in the time after the Russian invasion, that eventually Putin would take over all of Ukraine, but that if he were president, Putin never would've invaded, and if he could just get Putin and Zelenskyy alone in a room, he could solve it within a day. This is completely crazy, but it's a reflection to Putin that ultimately a Trump presidency would be very beneficial to him.
MUSIC SHIFTS
Peter Bergen: One common theme that you talk about with President Trump, he was always saying, ‘Let's just get out. Let's get out of South Korea. Let's get out of Afghanistan. Let's get out of Syria.’ Could you explain that impulse and what he would say?
John Bolton: Well, I think Trump had trouble with complicated situations and where he thought he saw a political advantage, for example, in ending endless wars, trying to explain to him that it wasn't quite as easy as that didn't penetrate. So, if your focus is limited to the attention span of a fruit fly, then you're not gonna see the larger issues, and that was a very common problem.
Peter Bergen: If you go back, even in the 1980s, he was railing against the Japanese, and he's had a sort of consistent idea that other countries are ripping the United States off, and this sort of neo-isolationism, clearly that has begun to be part of the Republican party mainstream. That he has kind of reorientated the Republican party away from internationalism to something that's more isolationist, and that's permanent, whether he becomes the next president or next nominee or not?
John Bolton: No, I don't think so. I think Trump focuses on the politics of grievance. That's the contrast with Ronald Reagan, who said famously in his 1984 reelection campaign, ‘It's morning in America.’ I think conservatism is the philosophy that says, ‘It's always morning in America. We may have our problems, but ultimately we will triumph.’ And, I think, when you look at it that way, it shows why Trump's effect on the party is almost certain to be transitory. Now, it is the case though that there is an outbreak of the virus of isolationism, but it's still a small problem within the party. I hope to make it an even smaller problem.
Peter Bergen: Trump is, I think, the first president in American history who neither had a political background or had served in the military. Do you think that affected the way he behaved as commander-in-chief, and do you think he learned on the job, so that he'll be better the next time?
John Bolton: I think certainly he learns things that are beneficial to him, but he never had a real grasp of how the federal government works or how he could make it work, to achieve policy outcomes. So, I think his focus would remain, as it was in the first term, in the greater glory of Donald Trump. In a second Trump term, people need to remember, he would face no political constraints. He could never run for another term. So the risk of endangering key political constituencies would not be, in a second term, nearly what it was in a first term.
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Peter Bergen: Does he have sort of an enemy's list that he would want to exact revenge on people who’ve crossed him, at least in his own mind?
John Bolton: Well, I think he's got an active enemy's list. Sometimes he crosses people off, because he gets revenge on them. It's a long list. It keeps growing. But he certainly doesn't forget. He has said, publicly, ‘I will be your retribution.’
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. [SOUNDS OF CHEERING]
John Bolton: Meaning retribution for his supporters. But that's not really what he's after. He's after retribution for people who have crossed him.
Peter Bergen: Are you one of those people?
John Bolton: Oh, I have no doubt.
[ARCHIVAL AMBIENCE FROM JANUARY 6, 2020, SOUNDS OF CRASHES, YELLING]
ARCHIVAL Voice 1: We're boots on the ground here.
ARCHIVAL Voice 2: We're moving on the Capitol now.
ARCHIVAL Voice 3: This is now effectively a riot.
ARCHIVAL Voice 4: 13:49 hours, declaring it a riot.
ARCHIVALLiz Cheney: [AT JAN. 6 HEARING] Every American must consider this: Can a president who was willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6th ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?
Peter Bergen: Where were you on January 6th?
John Bolton: I was at home and watching with dismay as the events unfolded. It was one of the saddest days in American history.
Peter Bergen: Is Trump responsible?
John Bolton: I think he's largely responsible. I do not think it was an assault on democracy. I think it was Donald Trump and a few fanatics that he was able to mobilize. Personally, I would take everybody who was found or arrested inside the Capitol and put them in jail for the maximum that the statutes allow. Those people knew they shouldn't be in the Capitol, even if they didn't undertake damage themselves, they knew they shouldn't have been there, and I think they should be punished for it.
Six days later, the service chiefs of all the branches of the U.S. military, led by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, took the extraordinary measure of sending a joint letter to the two million members of the active duty, National Guard, and Reserve units of the military, saying, quote, ‘President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander-in-Chief.’ The message was clear: The U.S. military would not be assisting Trump in any attempt to stop the peaceful transition of power.
The attack on the U.S. Capitol triggered Trump’s second impeachment trial. He was once again acquitted by the Senate, but he now had the distinction of being the only American president to be impeached twice. And yet, he’s currently the Republican Party frontrunner by a mile. But it’s still very early. Trump is facing multiple criminal investigations and lawsuits, and already one indictment in New York and another in Florida. And it’s anyone’s guess who might be able to peel off enough voters who’ve grown weary of Trump to derail his nomination.
John Bolton: I believe national security is far more important in public policy than it is typically given in presidential campaigns, and I think it's important to change that if you took the amount of time that an incumbent president spends on national security issues over a period of time and compare it to the amount of time in a campaign where national security issues are debated, the disjunction is incredible.
Peter Bergen: The criminal indictment, does it help him politically?
John Bolton: I think ultimately the real question is not the alpha, it's the omega. What's the outcome? If he's acquitted, it will be like rocket fuel to his campaign, because it will enable him to say, I told you they were persecuting me. They were picking on me, and this is the proof of it. Now, if he's convicted, I think it's a very different story because people will say, well, even if it was unfair, a jury convicted him, and I really don't think Americans want to elect a felon to be president.
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In January 2020, Trump approved a drone strike in Baghdad that killed the top Iranian General, Qasem Soleimani, saying that Soleimani was planning an imminent attack on U.S. military personnel.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Today, we remember and honor the victims of Soleimani’s many atrocities, and we take comfort in knowing that his reign of terror is over.
The assassination of Soleimani for Bolton got personal. Bolton’s hawkish views on Iran are well known, and now he has 24/7 Secret Service protection.
Peter Bergen: Why are the Iranians trying to kill you?
John Bolton: Well, I think it's not just me. I mean, they do have other targets, and I think it’s attributed to the early departure that Qasem Soleimani suffered, and they clearly wanted to take revenge for that.
Peter Bergen: That must be pretty difficult for you?
John Bolton: Well, I'm still here, so it's better than the alternative.
One final note: we reached out numerous times to the Trump campaign for any response to John Bolton's comments in this episode, and we received no reply.
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If you'd like to learn more about some of the stories and issues we discussed in this episode, we recommend The Room Where it Happened, by John Bolton and The Divider, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. And I also have a book on this: The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.
You might also want to check out our recent episode on how the U.S. intelligence community views the indictment of former president Trump. It’s called ‘Decoding the Trump Indictment.'
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