John Bolton
says he won't vote for Trump and hopes he is a one-term president
Promoting
his book, former national security advisor says president ‘doesn’t have the
competence to carry out the job’
Helen
Sullivan
@helenrsullivan
Mon 22 Jun
2020 04.31 BSTLast modified on Mon 22 Jun 2020 09.02 BST
John
Bolton, the former national security advisor, has said he will not vote for
Donald Trump at the November election and hopes history will remember him as a
“one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward
spiral.”
In an
interview with ABC News to promote his book, The Room Where It Happened,
Bolton, who was Trump’s longest-serving security adviser, says that when he joined
the administration he “had confidence going in that many of the stories were
distorted. That turned out not to be right”.
Trump had
sought to have publication of the book blocked, but a judge denied the claim.
Bolton told
the ABC News chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz that Trump was
not fit for office.
“I don’t
think he should be president. I don’t think he’s fit for office. I don’t think
he has the competence to carry out the job. I don’t think he’s a conservative
Republican. I’m not going to vote for him in November. I’m certainly not going
to vote for Joe Biden either. I’m going to figure out a conservative Republican
to write in.”
Earlier on
Sunday, the Daily Telegraph in the UK reported that Bolton had intended to vote
for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, quoting him as saying that he
had voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, but that,
“having seen this president up close, I cannot do this again. My concern is for
the country, and he does not represent the Republican cause that I want to
back.”
A
spokesperson for Bolton told CNN that the life-long Republican would be voting
for neither Biden nor Trump, saying: “This statement is incorrect. The
ambassador never said he planned to vote for Joe Biden.”
Asked in
the ABC interview how he thought history would remember Trump, Bolton replied:
“I hope it will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the
country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can’t recall from. We can get
over one term. Two terms I’m more troubled about.”
Bolton also
described Trump’s chances of making a deal with North Korea as “zero”, and said
Russian president Vladimir Putin felt of the US president that he could “play
him like a fiddle”.
He said the
US is in a “weaker position around the world. I think we have given up
leadership in a wide variety of areas,” when it comes to national security.
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