John Bolton has been a fixture of every Republican president going back to Reagan, but he only has open contempt for one: Donald Trump. The on-again-off-again administration figure and noted war hawk has been loud and clear about how dumb he thought his last White House boss was. Even when Bolton went on CNN to claim he wasn’t actually trying to plan a coup in his last months in office, he did so backhandedly — and while casually making a pretty alarming confession about himself.
Tapper: I don’t know if I agree with you with all due respect. One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup
Bolton: I disagree with that as somebody who has helped plan coups, not here but other places… pic.twitter.com/jK61a0e3lV— Acyn (@Acyn) July 12, 2022
Bolton was speaking to Jake Tapper about the ongoing, pretty weird Jan. 6 hearings, and he disagreed that what he was doing was a “carefully planned coup d’état,” which he admitted take “a lot of work.”
“That’s not the way Donald Trump does things,” Bolton told Tapper. “It’s rambling from one half-assed idea to another. One plan that falls through and another comes up. That’s what he was doing. As I say, none of it is defensible. But you have to understand the nature of what the problem of Donald Trump is.”
Tapper pointed out that “one doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.”
“I disagree with that,” Bolton replied. “As somebody who has helped plan coup d’état — not here, but other places — it takes a lot of work. And that’s not what he did. It was just stumbling around from one idea to another.”
Did Bolton just admit on a live news show that he helped plan a coup? He sure did. Tapper circled back to that admission soon after, but when asked which coups he helped plan, Bolton replied with a laugh, “I’m not going to get into the specifics.”
But when asked if he’d played a part in any “successful coups,” Bolton did point to his latest memoir, which contained passages on one in Venezuela he said “turned out not to be successful.”
He added, “Not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try to overturn an illegally elected president. And they failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable.”
Tapper told him, “I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me.”
“I’m sure there is,” he replied.
Bolton did allow that Trump was responsible for what happened on Jan. 6. “Ultimately, he did unleash the rioters at the Capitol, as to that, there’s no doubt,” he told Tapper. “But not overthrow the Constitution, to buy more time to throw the matter back to the states to try to redo the issue. And if you don’t believe that, you’re going to overreact.”
Bolton’s hatred of Trump is fully reciprocated. One of the many Trump tell-alls claimed he hoped his former national security adviser would catch COVID and die.
(Via The Daily Beast)