Second Donald Trump term will endanger US, says John Bolton

The re-election of Donald Trump would be a ‘danger to the republic’, says his former national security adviser.

John Bolton, a lifelong hardline Republican, says he could not vote for Mr Trump. Picture: AP

The re-election of Donald Trump would be a “danger to the republic” and would have “grave consequences”, his former national ­security adviser said before the publication on Wednesday AEST of a damning memoir of 17 months at his side.

John Bolton, 71, a lifelong hardline Republican, said he could not vote for Mr Trump but would write in the name of a “true conservative” on his ballot paper in November. He said he hoped that his book would be a contribution to a discussion on “what the post-Trump party looks like”.

The President and his allies stepped up their attacks on Mr Bolton’s veracity and character on Tuesday after a TV interview with the former ambassador that drew the day’s highest viewing figures, 6.1 million.

Asked how he thought history would remember Mr Trump, Mr Bolton told ABC News: “I hope it will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral. We can get over one term. Two terms I’m more troubled about. Decisions are made in a scattershot fashion, especially in the potentially mortal field of ­national security policy. This is a danger for the republic.”

John Bolton’s book will be released on Wednesday AEST. Picture: Simon & Schuster via AP

Mr Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened, is being released on schedule after Mr Trump’s failed legal action to stop it. The government claimed that the book contained classified information; a federal judge warned that it “gambled with the national security of the United States” but refused to block it.

Mr Bolton said Mr Trump had a “naive” approach to hostile foreign leaders. “I think many of these foreign leaders mastered the art of ringing his bells,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin entered meetings with Mr Trump having undergone “a level of preparation, of thoroughness, of pre-planning that just would not register with Donald Trump … I can just see the smirk when he knows he’s got him following his line. It’s almost transparent.”

As part of the Trump campaign fightback an excerpt from a forthcoming book by the former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was leaked to Axios news website. She wrote: “Bolton was a classic case of a senior White House official drunk on power, who had forgotten that ­nobody elected him to anything.”

In his ABC interview Mr Bolton defended his decision not to give evidence to the impeachment inquiry, insisting that now was a “better time to tell the story” because it was closer to the presidential election.

Mary Trump, the president’s niece, plans to publish a memoir exposing family secrets. Mr Trump told Axios that she was “not allowed” to write her memoir because she had signed a non-­disclosure agreement nearly two decades ago — a “very powerful one” that “covers everything”.

The Times