Politico | Bolton says Trump concerned only about his re-election
- ‘When it comes to re-election, his attention span is infinite,’ the former US national security adviser says of Trump
- Bolton believes foreign leaders like Kim Jong-un get ‘a huge laugh’ out of their relationship with Trump
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Rishika Dugyala on politico.com on June 21, 2020.
Former US national security adviser John Bolton said that President Donald Trump’s otherwise limited attention span was “infinite” when it came to his re-election, a looming event that shaped almost every decision.
In an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC News that aired Sunday – days before Bolton’s scathing tell-all of his time working for the Trump administration will be released – Bolton said he didn’t “see anything where [re-election] wasn’t the major factor”.
“A lot of people have complained that he has a short attention span and he doesn’t focus,” Bolton said. “When it comes to re-election, his attention span is infinite. It’s just too bad there wasn’t more of that when it came to national security.”
In his book, The Room Where it Happened, Bolton calls the president “stunningly uninformed”. On Sunday, he said he had to explain concepts over and over again, like why the Korean peninsula was partitioned in 1945 at the end of World War II. Trump was unwilling to do “systematic learning” and hadn’t read much of anything, Bolton said. Intelligence briefings took place once or twice a week; Bolton said they should have been happening daily.
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Trump ‘pleaded’ for China to help him get re-elected, writes former US adviser Bolton in new book
On national security, Bolton said there was no real policy: Trump seemed to think a good personal relationship with China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un was equivalent to a good relationship between the United States and their respective countries.