
‘He Thinks He and Putin Are Friends’: John Bolton on How Trump Gets Manipulated
Trump’s former national security adviser lets loose on the leaked Signal group chat and Trump’s foreign policy.
Much of Washington is still waiting anxiously to learn who — if anyone — will be fired over the embarrassment now known as Signalgate. But the real battle underneath it all is which conservative faction will define Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
Will it be old school hawks like national security adviser Michael Waltz, who made the mistake of inviting Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into the chat, or America First types like Vice President JD Vance, who expressed skepticism about the strikes on the Houthis in Yemen.
One person who is no stranger to bureaucratic knife-fighting in a Trump administration is John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term before having an ugly falling out with the president.
In an interview for the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, Bolton discussed Signal disclosures, Trump’s approach to Vladimir Putin and what it’s like to be the subject of the president’s personal vendettas.
A longtime national security hawk, Bolton also had some choice words for Vance, who grumbled on Signal about the American military being needed to open up shipping lanes for Europeans.
The United States has been committed to “freedom of the seas” since the days of Thomas Jefferson, Bolton said. “It’s all out there, just open a book.”.
Within hours of being sworn in, Trump revoked your Secret Service protection despite the Iranians having a price on your head. What is it like to know five years after your falling out with him that he’s still thinking about you on his first day back in the White House?
Well, I’m glad to be on his mind. I guess that’s the only thing I can say.
It obviously had an effect on me and the others whose security protection he canceled, but the bigger effect is on the U.S. itself. When foreign adversaries think that senior American officials — former or present — can be exposed if they fall out with Donald Trump, that tells them something about our vulnerability and it tells his current senior advisers something about their vulnerability too. This is not the way to run a railroad.
Do you fear for your life now without that security? Have you had to pay for private security?
I’m making arrangements, the specifics of which I won’t get into. But this is not chatter on the internet. This threat — not just to myself, but including Trump and [Mike] Pompeo, [Mark] Esper, [Mark] Milley and others — is a conclusion of years of watching the Iranians and pretty solid information about the nature of the threat. I don’t think the Iranians give up easily. They were after Trump just before the election. Charges were filed against [someone] trying to hire a hitman against Trump himself in the period before the election, which is pretty brazen. So it continues to be current, no doubt about it.
Let’s talk about Signalgate. When you were national security adviser, how often did you put highly sensitive attack plans into a Signal chat with a reporter?
Well, I didn’t use Signal then and, you know, I took a pretty simplistic approach to things.
I was being sarcastic, by the way.
I would say that there are two kinds of communication when you’re in one of these senior administration positions. There’s communications over the government-secure telecommunications network on which we have spent billions of dollars and decades of effort to make impenetrable by our adversaries. So there’s that option, and then there is every other option and every other option is not acceptable.
How does a well-oiled national security apparatus conduct business on a weekend when you’re not in the office? The excuse the White House has given is, “Oh, everybody was sort of everywhere. We weren’t in the office.” It sounds like that’s not an excuse.
Look, if you want a group chat, there’s a place for it: It’s called the Situation Room. And if it’s Saturday or Sunday, that’s too damn bad, isn’t it? The United States is about to engage in using military force. You got something else more important in mind?
Number two, with a few exceptions on that list — like Steve Witkoff, whose presence is inexplicable to me — but for the secretary of State, secretary of Defense, director of National Intelligence, director of the CIA, national security adviser, they are never more than an arm’s length away from secure telecommunications. I had that kind of capability built into my house. I had a SCIF built in my basement by the National Security Council staff. All these people are receiving protection of one kind or another. They have secure phones in the vehicles they travel in. They have secured communications on their desks. It’s just inconceivable.
Let’s talk about the fallout. You know better than anyone that there’s two things Trump hates the most. Number one, he hates an embarrassing headline — anything that makes him look bad, he doesn’t like it. But he also hates giving longtime critics a win.
So far, we have seen that his concern about his critics getting a win by firing someone has protected Michael Waltz. But at what point do you think that embarrassment to him becomes the thing that’s most important?
It’s the former that’s most important. If he thinks he’s suffering political damage as a result of this, then I think the risk to everybody involved goes up, both holding onto their jobs and also the risk of real investigation. I think as long as Donald Trump doesn’t feel the heat, nobody will be investigated for anything and they won’t lose their jobs, at least in the short term. But the second metric at work is, what has all this done to Trump’s view of the people themselves? How much of this does he take before he says it’s not worth the risk down the road?
Now, that isn’t going to happen this week or next week or the week after. But we had [Pete] Hegseth earlier in an incident with Elon Musk, somebody maybe inviting Musk to the Pentagon for a briefing on the China war plan. Remember that war plan?
I do.
Trump specifically said later that he didn’t think that anybody should receive a briefing on the China war plan. That’s the correct position. And he said, almost gratuitously, “You know Elon has a lot of business in China. That could be a conflict of interest.”
Well, indeed, it could be a conflict of interest. And that was another signal. He didn’t like that at all. So I think Hegseth already had one strike against him. The Signal chat issue may be two strikes against him. But at some point, I do think people become vulnerable. But no action will be taken until a couple months from now at the earliest, when suddenly they’ll find some very attractive way to spend more time with their family.
It’s interesting that you brought up Pete Hegseth because some people have been surprised that all the focus has been on Michael Waltz. We talk to people in the White House, and the anger is not at Hegseth. I can tell you that for certain from my own conversations, it’s all focused on Waltz. And yet it was Pete Hegseth who put this sensitive information about strikes and timetables into the chat.
What can we take away from the fact that people close with Donald Trump are not talking about Hegseth? And in fact, I think the president said yesterday, “Pete did nothing wrong. This was all Mike.” What do you make of that?
Well, I think it says Waltz is more vulnerable and I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Everybody on that Signal group chat had a responsibility to protect government secrets and the daddy on that chat, the highest ranking official, was the vice president.
Waltz may have started it, but everybody else allowed it to go on. Hegseth has said in his defense that, “Well, I had a duty to keep these people informed.” No, he didn’t. The secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, doesn’t need to know when the second F-18 strike group is about to take off. The only other person, I think, other than Hegseth himself who should have been kept up to date moment-to-moment was Waltz, because he might have to tell the president or he might have to notify somebody else.
Is it true though that the secretary of Defense can declassify things on a whim? Do Trump officials have any sort of leg to stand on on this idea that if he decides this is not classified, it is therefore not classified?
If in terms of a defense against a criminal prosecution, if it’s not classified that may have something to do with it. But remember, the fascination with “Did they violate the law?” as opposed to “Did they just do something that no reasonable person should have done?” distracts from the real issue, which is potentially putting American service members in jeopardy.
I would say: Remember what that iconic French statesman the Marquis de Talleyrand was once said to have said: “It’s worse than a crime. It’s a mistake.” And that’s what this whole thing was, a mistake.
To go back to this notion of who’s the more vulnerable fall guy here, Hegseth or Waltz, how much of this is part of an ongoing civil war happening in the Republican Party right now? You have some who are more Reaganite, more hawkish types like Michael Waltz, like Marco Rubio.
And then you have a restrainer branch. The MAGA, America First faction of the GOP. Do you think that faction is putting the blame on Waltz to try to push him out?
I’ve read some of your reporting on it. I really think it’s pretty much one-sided, more by the pro-Russia faction within the MAGA movement against what you might call the Reaganite, the more traditional foreign policy wing. And they’re just obsessed with finding remnants of prior Republican administrations and purging them. I think the more Reaganite people are just trying to do their job, but it shows fundamentally that if that is a description, how non-serious these isolationists, neo-isolationists are and how they don’t understand really how much is at stake.
Do you have confidence that Waltz is going to be somebody who pushes back on this America First, isolationist wing of the party? And if so, do you want him not to resign?
Well, if I said I thought he should stay, that might hurt him. So you know the old saying in politics, “I’ll be for you or against you, whichever does you more good.”
I just think at this point, the only issue for Donald Trump is whether he’s being hurt. And I don’t see that he’s suffering harm at the moment. It could be that polls will show that there is harm. But that doesn’t mean that in his mind, many of the actors in this particular drama have really used up a lot of their political capital and are on very thin ice with him down the road.
If we didn’t already know it from Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference a couple weeks ago, we certainly learned it from the Signal chain that he has a lot of disdain for Europe. He made it clear he thought that intervening with the Houthis was bailing Europe out.
There were a number of Republicans on the Hill who were super pissed that the administration took out this provision in a spending bill in December that would have culled American investment in China. What do you make of his position right now — or can you even really define it?
Well, I think he blames China for his loss of the 2020 election because of Covid.
But beyond that, going back to his first term, he wants at some point to negotiate the biggest trade deal in human history with China. So if you look at a very tumultuous opening two months, while tariff measures have been traded back and forth by China and the United States, it’s been relatively quiet compared to a lot of other fronts. And I think Xi Jinping is waiting to see a little bit better what Trump is going to do and I think Trump, hoping for this opportunity to do the biggest trade deal in history, has not been willing to turn the heat on yet.
I think it’s a huge mistake. I don’t care whether they sell TikTok or not, it ought to be banned in this country. It’s an arm of Chinese intelligence. Doesn’t matter what’s on the platform. It’s a vacuum cleaner of American habits and actions that entirely benefit China.
Do you think that China has the upper hand on TikTok because the president is not going to want to go through with getting rid of it?
Yeah. It’s unbelievable. He was against TikTok before it helped him in the election.
This is the epitome of Donald Trump. If it’s good for me, I’m for it. If it’s not good for me, I am against it.
Obviously you’ve been very critical of President Trump and his current foreign policy, but I’m wondering if there is anything you think he’s doing right on the global stage right now?
I think the closing of the southern border seems to be going very well. He’s not doing what he wants to do in terms of deportation. He may never be able to, but it turns out he was able to close the border in the first term and he’s doing it again now because the principle of deterrence works against illegal immigrants too. If they think they’re going to walk across Central America and Mexico and get to the Rio Grande and not get in, they’re sensible enough not to leave their homes to begin with.
I think most Americans favor more immigration, but that we should pick who comes in. So he’s got himself a victory on that score. I don’t think there’s any question about it.