Former national security adviser John Bolton says President Donald Trump’s guiding principle isn’t politics, but rather “what’s good for Donald Trump.”
Making the rounds on television Thursday to promote his tell-all “The Room Where It Happened,” Bolton told MSNBC that “Donald Trump is not a conservative Republican.”
“What I tried to show in the book is he doesn't operate on the basis of philosophy,” he said. “He doesn't operate on the strategy or policy. He operates on what's good for Donald Trump… It's a qualitative difference in the way Donald Trump approaches the job.”
He also accused House Democrats of committing “impeachment malpractice.”
“We know how to conduct an impeachment process that leads to a result, that is the removal of the president from office,” he said. “If your job is to rally the base or do virtue signaling to make you feel good, there's a way to do that. The Democrats by their own choice… didn't try to work together with the Republicans. As a consequence… you basically got a partisan process.”
Bolton also said he never made a call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to urge him to talk with Rudy Giuliaini as Trump had asked him to do.
“When I finally went to Kiev myself, I pulled aside Zelensky's new prosecuor general and said ‘you'll hear a lot of things about corruption. Talk to the U.S. Justice department. Talk to [Attorney General] Bill Barr. Don't talk to Rudy Giuliani.’ I hoped that message would put things back in the regular course between the two countries.”
According to Bolton, “the Russians, the Chinese, perhaps Iranians and the North Koreans are trying to plant discourse in our elections.”
“This is a serious problem,” he said. “I think that inside the Trump administration a number of steps were taken. I talk about some of them in the book to prepare us better, not to just defend against assaults on the Constitution which is what I think foreign interference is, but to have the capability to help them pay a price, something that will lead them to conclude it's too costly for them to interfere in our elections.”
In a separate interview on Fox News, Bolton warned a victory for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in November would lead to “another four years” of former President Barack Obama's foreign policy.
“I think the United States suffered substantial harm internationally because of their policies across a wide variety of fronts,” Bolton told the news outlet, specifying "China, the North Korean and Iran nuclear programs, [and] dealing with Russia" among "a whole range of issues."
He added that what prevents him from supporting Trump's reelection is what he described as the president's “inconsistency, lack of guidance philosophy, and disjointed sporadic decision-making style.”
“It’s kind of [an] apples and oranges comparison," Bolton said, "in that they both trouble me but for very different reasons."
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