Trump unloads on Bolton after election comments, calling ex-adviser a ‘dope’ who wanted to ‘go to war’

President Donald Trump has called former national security adviser John Bolton a “dope,” saying his advice always boiled down to “Gee, let’s go to war.” Bolton earlier called on the GOP to abandon Trump and tell voters he lost.

“John Bolton was one of the dumbest people in government that I’ve had the ‘pleasure’ to work with,” Trump tweeted on Sunday afternoon. “A sullen, dull and quiet guy, he added nothing to National Security except, ‘Gee, let’s go to war.’ Also, illegally released much Classified Information. A real dope!”

Trump’s outburst didn’t come out of the blue. Earlier on Sunday, Bolton hit the cable news talk show circuit to trash his former employer, telling CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that history will remember Trump “as a failed president” who “couldn’t focus his attention long enough to develop coherent policies.” Bolton then called on the Republican Party to abandon Trump, and tell its voters that the president “lost fair and square.”

Bolton also made an appearance on ABC, where he said that Trump’s “claims of election fraud are baseless.”

Relations between Bolton and the president have been anything but cordial since the hawkish national security adviser was booted from Trump’s administration last September. Trump had publicly disagreed with Bolton over the latter’s enthusiasm for war with Iran and for apparently sabotaging peace talks with North Korea, and quipped in January that “if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now.”

Since his departure from the White House, Bolton has further stoked Trump’s anger by criticizing the president on TV, and by his less-than-flattering portrayal of Trump in his book, ‘The Room Where it Happened.’ Bolton’s description of Trump as geopolitically clueless was slammed by Trump, who called Bolton a “war mongering fool” and “washed up creepster” in response.

Trump’s appointment of Bolton was criticized on both sides of the political aisle. Some of Trump’s supporters saw his hiring as a betrayal of the president’s campaign-trail promise to end the US’ “forever wars” and withdraw from the Middle East. Bolton, who has advocated regime-change operations in Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, and North Korea, never got his way, and should Trump’s legal efforts to stay in power fail, he will leave office as the first president in four decades not to have started a new war.

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