Here’s a little challenge for readers: I’ll give you a quote, and you guess who said it.
“A mountain of facts demonstrates that Trump is unfit to be president,” this person said. “If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse.”
If you’re thinking the quote came from President Joe Biden or a congressional Democrat, that would certainly make sense. In fact, leading Democratic officials have certainly made plenty of assessments like these about Donald Trump of late.
But the quote actually came from John Bolton — who served as Trump’s White House national security advisor for a year and a half. The paperback version of the notorious foreign policy hawk’s book is out this week, and as Axios noted, it includes fresh criticisms of Bolton’s former boss.
John Bolton — Donald Trump’s former national security adviser — is laying out his nightmare scenarios for a second Trump term in a foreword to the paperback edition of his memoir “The Room Where It Happened,” out Tuesday. … Bolton writes that “a mountain of facts demonstrates that Trump is unfit to be President.”
In the new foreword to his book, Bolton reportedly warns that Trump would likely abandon the NATO alliance, use the levers of power to retaliate against his perceived political foes, and trigger a constitutional crisis.
Bolton also sat down with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and said Trump’s candidacy is welcomed by Russia, China, and North Korea, whose leaders see Trump as a “fool” and an “easy mark.”
“They’re fully prepared to take advantage of him,” he added. “Trump’s self-absorption makes it impossible for him to understand that.”
Bolton’s comments come just three weeks after former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who also worked for the former president for a year and a half, told a national television audience that Trump is “a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us.”
Last year, Trump’s former Pentagon chief also told the public that he believes Trump is a threat to our national security.
Republicans like Bolton and Esper aren’t just random observers. Trump tapped both of these men for incredibly powerful positions. They worked side by side with the GOP’s presumptive nominee, giving them front-row seats on how Trump thinks, listens, processes information, evaluates evidence, and makes decisions.
And now they’re practically begging voters to see the former president as unfit for office. If Bolton and Esper were alone, this might be easier to dismiss, but as regular readers know, the likely GOP nominee has faced condemnations from an amazing number of officials from his own team. The list includes several former members of the White House Cabinet — former White House chief of staff John Kelly can barely contain his visceral contempt for the former president — and it grows much longer if we include other officials who worked with Trump just below the Cabinet level. History offers plenty of examples of presidents who’ve clashed with one aide or another, but we’ve never seen anything like this. Indeed, one of the things that make the 2024 race unique is an unprecedented dynamic: The Republican candidate’s opponents and many of the Republican candidate’s former aides are saying the exact same things. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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